Echoes
by inwardtransience
Summary: The Jedi thought that, by turning their greatest enemy into an unwitting assassin, they could grasp victory from the jaws of defeat, and safeguard the Republic, the democratic and egalitarian principles at its foundation, for future generations. Really, they should have just killed her.
1. The Fall

The deck shook.

Not with the tiny, almost imperceptible shiver of powerful machinery at work, but with the bone wrenching shudder of a chemical explosion. The air was filled with noise and fire, the pressure enough she almost choked, the heat against her skin, even crouched behind a security console, intense enough she winced. But it lasted only an instant, the tightly-controlled destruction flaring out as quickly as it'd begun.

As soon as she'd recovered from the unforgiving force of the shape charges, Bastila sprung up and rolled over the sparking console, dropping to her feet and running for the neatly obliterated blast doors. She wasn't at all surprised to see the other Jedi all seconds ahead of her, Master Kavar already disappearing through the smoke-obscured doorway. One by one they slipped through, the soft glow of lightsabers a variety of colors enduring a second after their forms had disappeared. Bastila dove into the smoke last, the remaining strike troopers folding in behind her.

She stepped over the shattered remnants of the door, blinded by the yet thick smoke, but her feet falling true. The cloud parted after only a few steps, revealing the Jedi gathered, the bridge just beyond. Rimmed with tall windows of transparisteel, divided into sharp triangles here and there with beams of solid metal, so clear and so clean it might as well not exist, the stars beyond, the burnt orange of the dead planet to the right, so vivid she could taste them. To the left, above, all around, dozens of lumbering capital ships, great wedges of gleaming silver and white, flickering with the flash of turbolasers and missiles against shields, the flare of energy so constant it almost seemed solid. The front line, so to speak, was some distance off, the Interdictor they'd infiltrated screened by an escort of intimidating strength, only a handful of Republic fighters penetrated this far, rushing Sith guns with suicidal bravery.

Some distance away, yes, almost hard to see, but Bastila could still feel them. Minds focused on the here-and-now with razor keenness, blood hot with adrenaline, so thick with tension it was painful, joints aching and eyes stinging with sweat. Not a single mind, that would be distracting enough, but _thousands_ of them. Packs of them, hundreds and hundreds each, collected into the tight mass indicating greater capital ships, the smaller gunships and smaller yet fighters buzzing between them, so quick and so many she felt them not as single points of light but a diffuse cloud, sensation blurring into a seamless whole. The terror at near misses, pilots scrambling as potshots flared against their shields, exultation as a shot struck home, an enemy reduced to plasma, far outliving the terror and agony as lives winked out. By the hundreds, a tempest of death, of pain, of fear, of ecstasy, so many and so _much_ it was hard to keep it all straight. Hard to keep it all _outside_ , so powerful it forced itself upon her, couldn't be denied.

It was so _much_ , she couldn't help feeling it, it was distracting. But she couldn't let herself be distracted, not longer than that second she'd just lost. Even a second was enough to get her killed.

Somewhat to her surprise, the bridge crew, the familiar uniforms looking slightly strange in silvers and blacks, were still at their stations, sunk into the floor on either side of the walkway she and the other Jedi now stood on, still going about their business, muttering light on the air as rustling leaves, hands against consoles a constant shiver of movement. Not perfectly at ease, no — a few snuck cautious looks at them, not quite fearful, but perhaps anxious, a low anxiety that many eased with a simple glance forward, toward the other end of the walkway, the two figures standing there.

One, Bastila knew from the insignia pinned over his left breast, was the captain of this particular Interdictor. (She knew she'd been told it at one point, but she'd since forgotten his name.) He was half turned toward them, eyes set in an oddly youthful face narrowed with...annoyance? Something less than fear, in any case. After a tense moment, the gathered Jedi waiting for some sign to move, the captain glanced at the figure next to him, a clear question in his bearing.

This one was not wearing the off-color Republic uniforms the traitor navy had adapted. From behind, the figure was entirely obscured by a heavy cloak in black and deep red, only a pair of shining combat boots peeking out from under the hem. But that was more than enough, Bastila knew who this was. She'd be able to tell with her eyes closed. Power filled the room, power so thick it was as a charge on the air, like the fiercest of Dantooine summer storms. So thick her skin tingled, so thick she could taste it. Power intense yet calm, solid as ice and rimmed with blackness, ferocious yet tame. Death lying in wait, restrained with iron will.

Yet, despite herself, Bastila was surprised. She'd expected Darth Revan — former Jedi and hero of the Republic, current Dark Lord of the Sith — would be taller. The top of her head barely reached her captain's chin, and he wasn't a tall man, either. But Bastila shook the thought off, dragging herself back to the moment. Even a second was enough to get her killed.

"You'd better get behind the ray shields, Captain." She spoke with an obvious educated coreworld accent, cool and refined, an alto so clear and smooth a person couldn't help being instinctively drawn to it. The voice of a scholar, the voice of a leader, the voice of a Jedi. With a touch of dark humor, she added, "I'm afraid our guests intend to make a mess."

A smirk twitched at the captain's lips. "Of course, my lord." After a bow so abbreviated it was more a nod, the man stepped away, down a few steps among the consoles. A push of a single button, and impenetrable ray shields snapped into existence with an actinic crackle, the depressions to both sides of the walkway locked away with shimmering blue and white. The captain shot the gathered strike team a last glance before putting his back on them, turning to his crew.

And Bastila could feel it, the sense obvious in the air. They weren't afraid. Not a one of them were afraid, not of her and the Jedi, not of the soldiers at their backs. Not of the battle raging just bare kilometers away. Focused, yes, nervous, yes, but afraid? Not even a little. Honestly, she wasn't surprised. They had Revan. _The_ Revan. They had every reason to believe they'd be making it out of this in one piece.

Bastila suppressed the cold shiver working down her spine as well as she could.

Lightsabers losely gripped in his hands, deactivated for the moment, Kavar finally spoke. She wondered if that was what he'd been waiting for, for Revan to protect her men, what that said about Kavar, what that said about Revan. Perfectly calmly, as though they _weren't_ confronting a Dark Lord, Kavar said, "I don't suppose you'd be willing to surrender."

"I don't suppose you would. Save me the trouble." _Of killing you_ , she meant. She didn't seem even the slightest bit concerned, everything about her perfectly confident, that hint of humor still in her voice.

"You're outnumbered, you're cornered. You can't win, Lesami." Bastila blinked at Kavar's use of Revan's birth name — she hadn't heard it spoken aloud in years.

"Good point. It's not like I've ever been outnumbered before."

She shivered again. In part, it was Revan's voice, the way she said it, too calm, too confident, too light and sarcastic. In part, it was the truth in what she said. This was _Revan_. If numbers were all it took, she'd have been defeated long ago.

Not for the first time, Bastila had to wonder if this assault weren't horribly misguided.

"You know what we must do." With the slightest flick, Kavar's twin blades came to life with the familiar cry of barely-contained plasma, his robes and his close-cropped hair awash in blue. The rest of the Jedi followed his lead, Bastila bringing her own blade hovering across her face in a guard. She could feel the fight coming upon them, hard and tense in the air, and she swallowed down the instinctive dread, focused on the here-and-now. "I am sorry, Lesami."

"We both have our regrets, Kavar. But, you're wrong."

Without a twitch, with hardly an instant's warning, a pulse of deadly power washed out from Revan in an inexorable wave. Bastila cringed away, reached without thought for the Force, struck out against the incoming blackness with an intangible blade. It broke around her, quickly dissolving into nothing.

The air broke with a staccato series of sharp snaps. Bastila glanced behind her, toward the sound of weight slumping toward the floor, and jerked away, failing to hold in a gasp of shock. All the remaining troopers and one of the Jedi, a Bith named Tak'ak Bastila had never met before, had fallen, dead. Their heads had been jerked around, _all_ the way around, shards of bone splitting skin, blood slowly pooling on polished gray metal. They were _dead_ , just _like that_ , in an _instant_ —

 _There is no emotion; there is peace. There is no emotion; there is peace. There is no—_

Voice still smooth and terrifyingly calm, filling the room, Revan said, "There is _always_ a choice." And she moved.

Kavar darted forward to meet her, so quick they were both blurs, but Revan ducked under his blades, her cloak whirling about her, and she was behind him, thrusting both hands forward to nearly meet his back. Kavar was taken from his feet, rocketing away toward the far bulkhead with deadly speed, and Revan was already moving, appearing among them in the blink of an eye. A clench of a fist and Koran's head imploded with a sickening crunch, blood and brain streaming through the air, verdant light was descending for Revan's neck but was met with violet, sprung from Revan's right hand, a bloody blade appearing in the other, Yurishtal was disemboweled before he could pull away. Anis and Bastila were falling upon him, blue and yellow lightsabers inches away when the tang of ozone suddenly filled the air, Bastila barely caught a bolt of purple-blue lightning against her blade, deflecting it into the ceiling, but still her skin tingled with power, her stomach turned at the waves of darkness washing over her, the force enough she was pushed backward, boots sliding against the deck with a high squeak, Anis had caught hers with her bare hand, flesh burning and fur singeing, but she held on, face twisted into a snarl, even as Revan stepped toward her, the purple blade moving in to—

And suddenly Kavar was there, the death blow turned aside with violence enough Revan was unbalanced, the lightning fading away, grasping for the red lightsaber she'd kept floating at her side. And Jedi Master and Sith Lord descended into a flickering storm of motion, skipping back and forth, blades moving so quickly they painted the air with solid swirls of blue and red and violet, green and yellow joining the display as Anis and Davon moved in, trying to circle to Revan's back, but she darted away, spinning around, kept the Jedi to one side, outmaneuvering them with casual ease, the Knights reduced to an occasional swipe past the Master's side, all but useless.

Bastila didn't join them, standing back. Instead she took a slow, deep breath, sank deep into herself, and reached outward.

Ever since she'd been the greenest initiate, back in the earliest days of her training at the Temple on Coruscant, Bastila had had a gift for perceiving and influencing the minds of other beings. She hadn't even needed to be taught, it was just... It was intuitive to her. She couldn't explain it, had never been able to, no matter how many times fascinated instructors and masters had asked. She would know what people were feeling, sometimes even their explicit thoughts, without having to try. (She had the feeling she'd _always_ done that, since she'd been a small child. Might have had something to do with why her parents had surrendered her to the Jedi in the first place.) She could get people to do simple things — answer her questions, hand her things, minor compulsions that only required a few seconds' influence — simply by _wanting_ them to happen. It could be difficult to _avoid_ doing it sometimes, she had to be mindful, constantly aware of what she was doing just to stop herself. The greater compulsions weren't quite so natural, but they'd always come easily to her as well. It had never been difficult for her, any of it.

Fortunate, really — it was very possible her development in other areas had lagged behind a bit. Her own special talent was generally enough for most people to overlook mild weaknesses elsewhere.

Starting a few years ago, though, it had started to get...odd. She'd noticed it the first time during a practice duel between two fellow padawans. She'd been able to feel their... Oh, she never could decide on the word for it. Their feelings, but not _just_ their feelings, their movements, but not _just_ their movements. She'd been able to feel it, everything they were doing, not just the placement of each limb, each breath and each twitch, but their intentions in doing so. And not just the two of them individually, but how their senses of themselves and their opponent fluctuated moment to moment, the back and forth of the duel forming an almost tactile presence before her. She'd been able to _see_ the balance of their duel before her, as though their performance, the balance of advantage within it, were a physical thing she could touch or taste.

A couple weeks later, she'd realized she could put her finger on the scales. She could prop one combatant up, or sabotage them. Make them quicker or slow them, slip an extra bit of grace into their movements or set them to stumble. She could sharpen their vision or blur it, turn their thoughts quick and focused or slow and distracted. Any contest performed in her presence was decided before it began: she could choose the winner, and that was that.

The fight before her now was... _more_ , different than any she'd ever felt. Mostly, it was Kavar and Revan who made it so. Every Jedi had a slightly different presence in the Force, distinct enough it was more identifiable than anything physical. Kavar didn't feel entirely like himself, descended into a deep trance, sunk far into intuition, power flowing through him in an unceasing wellspring of light, nearly overwhelming. Revan's presence was just as immediate, just as monolithic, but focused where Kavar was detached, mind and power narrowed to a razor edge. Before the dueling giants, the two knights were hardly perceptible, lost in the background of suffocating light and blazing shadow.

Normally, in a fight, she would be able to follow the movements, she could see it all, highlighted with supernatural clarity. Even whole battles, hundreds of ships carrying thousands of beings, all of it arrayed before her. But this, this she couldn't follow. They were just too _fast_ , sabers clashing and repositioning too quickly for her to keep up, moving, the angles between the combatants shifting, the Force swirling about them, into and through them, doing _something_ she couldn't even say, advantage slipping from one to the other before she could properly read it.

But she didn't have to be able to read it. She leaned on them, not so much putting her finger on the scales as slamming her hand down as hard as she could, power moving through her so thick and so quickly her muscles twitched, her blood burned. It hurt, rather more than she'd expected — physical bodies could only channel so much power at once, after all, and she'd had little reason to push that boundary in the past — but she didn't let herself waver, but pushed, pushed, _pushed_ —

She had only the barest of warnings. If she hadn't been so deeply fallen into the Force, she likely wouldn't have felt it coming at all. A sudden flare of alarm, her entire body giving a hard thrum of imminent danger, Bastila leaned, stumbled backward. Her eyes focused on the here-and-now just in time to see a purple lightsaber sail through where her head had been an instant ago.

Despite herself, she froze, trapped under the gaze of the Dark Lord. Her hood had fallen back at some point during the fight, but Bastila couldn't see her face — she still wore her famous Mandalorian mask, gleaming _beskar_ colored red and black, the paint chipped away here and there but the underlying metal still impenetrable. Bastila couldn't see Revan's eyes, but she could _feel_ the Dark Lord's attention on her, pressing in all around her, frigid and intense and suffocating, as though she were standing at the icy bottom of an ocean. She couldn't move a muscle, could only stand and stare back, feeling all too tiny (despite being nearly a head taller), all too vulnerable, helpless, her reflection in the empty visor swiftly paling.

After a short silence, a short stillness, Revan only said, "You are something."

Then Revan was moving again, meeting Kavar in an incomprehensible tumult of motion and color. And Bastila was — somehow, miraculously — still alive. She came to understand, slowly, as she tried to get herself moving again over the next couple seconds, that Revan had _spared_ her, consciously chosen to let her live.

She had absolutely no idea what to think about that.

The fight dragged on for what felt like hours, but could only be but minutes. Her battle meditation obviously useless against the Dark Lord, Bastila joined the fight more directly, but she wasn't doing much good. She and the two Knights, as they tried to circle around, tried to get a shot in at Revan, she could only think they were getting in the way. Revan maneuvered around them with casual grace, batted their clumsy assaults aside with contemptuous ease. Kavar was the only one who seemed to be making any showing of himself at all. While she and Anis and Davon were forced back occasionally, by either lightning or blunt force summoned from the ether, one time a _gout of purple flames_ that had Bastila skipping back and cursing under her breath, Kavar and Revan stayed toe-to-toe, lightsabers meeting and retreating and meeting again, the dance so fast they drew a solid web around them. They three could dart in and nip at the sides here and there, but Bastila couldn't help feeling their efforts were worse than useless.

That feeling only intensified when Anis fell to the floor, neatly bisected, dead so quickly she hadn't made a sound. Bastila hadn't even seen the blow that had taken her life, so sudden it had been, and she'd been standing _right next to her_.

As the fight dragged on and on, Bastila's limbs growing gradually heavier, sweat stinging at her eyes, she and Davon too obviously slowing, even Kavar turning tense, his movements tighter, less wasted energy, striking more cautiously, while Revan still seemed singularly composed, _casual_ , she couldn't help the feeling, she knew this fight would last _exactly_ how long Revan wished it. As soon as she wanted them dead, it would be so.

And then, all at once, the four of them froze. She and Davon gasping, even Kavar seemingly at least slightly breathless, all of them focused on something else. A feeling, a blanket of descending doom, overwhelming, she could feel it falling, noise and terror and agony and death, only seconds away. But the feeling was too diffuse, too _large_ , she couldn't tell where it was coming from, what it was. The Force wasn't even telling her which way to move, she was getting nothing. Only danger, imminent danger, that she was helpless to protect herself against.

The other two Jedi seemed as clueless as her. But Revan, she had turned away from them, head tipped to look out one of the windows. At the Sith capital ship there, slowly tumbling in place, a maneuver of some kind Bastila couldn't read. Lowly, talking to herself, even as the shields above them started to flare white with deadly radiance, Revan muttered, "Alek, you stupid son of a—"

And then everything was noise, and fire, and the rushing blackness of hard vacuum.

* * *

Beskar _— For any who don't know, this is the word in Mandoa for Mandalorian iron, the infamously nigh-indestructible metal the Mandalorians use for almost everything._

* * *

 _First posted in "Back Burner" some time ago. More notes on chapter 2._


	2. Cianen Hayal

Cianen Hayal idly tapped her fingernails against the glass, trying to contain her impatience. Because, of course, they just _had_ to be late to their meeting. She really shouldn't have expected any differently.

If she were to wait, this wasn't a bad place to do her waiting in. They'd left it up to her where exactly to make their introductions, so Cianen had picked her favorite of the restaurants she'd found in these last weeks wandering the Senate District of Coruscant. To be somewhat more precise, the favorite among those she'd found that weren't so ridiculously expensive the University wouldn't cover her expenses. This was the _Senate District of Coruscant_ , after all, the area had quite literally the highest standard of living in the entire galaxy. From the statistics she'd looked up in idle moments, even the waitstaff around here made a wage that would see them easily in the upper class on most Rim worlds. Yet even that wasn't enough to afford the meanest of housing within the bounds of the district itself — they all had to commute at least twenty kilometers, often significantly more.

Anyway, it was a rather nice place. All gleaming rosewood tables, carpets and drapes in reds and blacks, curtains filtering the sunlight, setting everything to a ruddy glow, some sort of sonic dampening tech reducing the conversations at the other tables to an incomprehensible murmur — but, somehow, allowing light music, an absolutely ancient Alderaanian piece played by a being of a species she didn't recognise at a real _piano_ of all things, to slip through unmuffled. The menu wasn't bad, if somewhat too exotic in places, so far as human consumption was concerned. Perhaps rather more pricey than she'd ever be able to afford herself, but that's what the expense account was for.

So she waited, sipping away at a procession of sweetened monstrosities that _supposedly_ had caf in them (she wasn't convinced). Flipping through journals she had saved on her datapad, ignoring the time displayed mockingly in the corner, trying to ignore her own annoyance.

Honestly, the red tape the Jedi forced people to go through. Sure, they had found some previously unexplored ruins on Dantooine. Sure, they'd wanted a xenolinguist to supplement their own team. Sure, the University of Aldera was one of the best places in the galaxy to borrow one from. But did they really have to make the thing so _difficult?_ It had taken _weeks_ of debate for both the University and the Jedi to agree on her, and _then_ she'd been here for _a couple more weeks_ for those damn interviews. Some sort of psych eval, apparently, to decide if they could trust her with...she wasn't sure, exactly. It wasn't like their investigation was classified or anything, she'd asked explicitly if she'd be able to publish whatever they found and been told that would be fine. But, who knew with Jedi? They could be so irrational about things sometimes.

There was a reason most of academia was wary when it came to working with the Jedi. It could be _very_ rewarding, of course, but they did tend to be...weird. Not to mention their bad habit of destroying artifacts or blacklisting sites — there was no telling how much had been lost during their so-called "Great Hunt", nor how long it would be until they lifted the blanket ban on any travel to Yavin IV. The Jedi did have a wealth of resources, and boasted some of the most uncorrupted scholars in the galaxy, but any work with them carried risks.

The point was, she was nearing the end of her patience. That she'd tolerated their delays and runarounds this long was rather magnanimous of her, she felt. After weeks of absurd negotiations, after weeks of pointless interviews, after days just _waiting_ for her escort to reach Coruscant, now she was waiting _hours_ for her contacts to finally get their butts down here. Honestly, why did she even _need_ a special escort to Dantooine? It was just Dantooine! The Jedi had regular shuttles going out to the place at least every week, they wouldn't have even had to tweak their schedule, and she would already be there! It was so stupid, she was so _tired_ of waiting for them to get their blasted act together.

Luckily for the last dregs of her sanity, her wait was finally over. They hadn't gotten to her table yet, no, they had just walked in the door, but all the same Cianen knew it was them as clearly as though they'd been announced. The people who frequented this place were mostly lower-level functionaries, perhaps ambassadorial staff from far-flung systems — irrespective of species and background, they had a way about them, a common set of habits and expectations that was identifiable in the way they dressed, the way they moved. The social environment at Aldera was similar enough Cianen was familiar with it, could blend in without too much trouble.

These two definitely didn't belong.

The first was a human woman, in tightly-tailored yet modest tunic and pants in pale orange and Republic red, brown hair cut short and bound sharply back, almost painfully practical. Her eyes darted around the room, hard and knowing, almost _too_ knowing, that way some people had of looking at someone and seeming to _know_ them, in an instant. (Cianen's gaze did the same thing, so she was well aware how unnerving people could find it.) There was something about the way she held herself, the way she walked — call it confidence, power, arrogance — whatever it was, Cianen didn't need the long lightsaber clipped to her hip to know this woman was a Jedi.

Just as she didn't need the red and gold Republic uniform to know the human man following at the Jedi's heel was military — he had the proper dignified posture, the almost regimented discipline in his gait. Though he wasn't _perfectly_ regulation. His dark hair was a bit longer than she thought was normal, flipping over his forehead in wispy curls, a bit more scruff on his face. A long cloak of thick, brown cloth half-hid the uniform, blasters just peeking out at each hip, not standard at all. Not to mention his expression, an almost petulant glare fixed on the Jedi's back. Enough personality to him she _almost_ couldn't imagine he'd been put together on an assembly line somewhere.

She had encountered droids with plenty of personality, after all.

The Jedi didn't even hesitate for a moment. Hands folded at the small of her back, she wound her way through the tables, breezing right past the flustered hostess without a word — if she weren't Caamasi there might have been a bit more of a reaction to that flagrant rudeness — making straight for Cianen. She'd probably been sent a holo or something. Oh, sure, if asked the Jedi would claim she'd _sensed her through the Force_ or whatever, they did like their whole mysterious ethos they had going, but the mundane explanation was far simpler. In a moment she was standing at the opposite side of Cianen's table, glaring down at her, face so tightly expressionless it was rigid. "Professor Hayal?"

Not moving an inch from where she sat reclined in her chair, Cianen lifted her glass in a little salute. She took a sip, drawing it out longer than necessary, before returning it to the surface. Eyes falling back to her datapad, she said, "You're late, Master Jedi. I was told to expect you—" A quick glance at the time. "—nearly three hours ago."

Cianen wasn't looking directly at her, maintaining her illusion of apathetic inattention, but she still caught the flash of a dark glower crossing the Jedi's face, there for the shortest instant before wiping away again. Hmm, odd — were Jedi even allowed to glower? _There is no passion_ , and all that. After a second of silence, the Jedi found her voice again. "My deepest apologies, Professor." Cianen blinked — were Jedi even allowed sarcasm? "We were held up on the way down to the surface longer than expected."

Personally, she found it hard to believe this Jedi could be unfamiliar with the frustrations of Coruscant traffic. But she shrugged it off. "No matter. Have a seat," she said, nodding at the empty seats around her table. "Lunch is on me." Or, on the University, anyway, but it made little difference. "Well, more like dinner now, I suppose."

The military man let out a snort at that, but accepted a seat gracefully enough. The Jedi hesitated a moment longer but, after an almost helpless glance at the man, collapsed into a seat with a thin sigh. "Very well. The _Spire_ won't be finished tripling for a few hours in any case."

Cianen was confused for a moment, before it came to her — Navy slang from refueling, restocking, and rearming, the three Rs. Right. "The _Spire?_ "

The man got to it before the Jedi did. "The _Endar Spire_ , it's a _Hammerhead_ light cruiser with the Third Fleet. And we never did get to introductions, did we?" Sticking a hand out over the table, lips tilting into a smirk, "Captain Carth Onasi."

She couldn't help the twitching of her own lips at the Jedi's wince. Taking his hand, "Cianen Hayal."

Onasi frowned at the name. "Alderaanian?"

"The name is, yes." And his was of Corellian extraction, of course, but Cianen couldn't even begin to guess which planet he was actually from. Corellians had spread themselves so widely across the galaxy it could be any of thousands of worlds. By contrast, Alderaanian colonies were few, probably less than a hundred worlds concentrated in the core, only a few trailing out along the Perlemian. They did have minority populations on a wealth of other worlds, but humans of Alderaanian descent were still far less ubiquitous than those of Corellian, hence his surprise at her name.

It was actually rather fascinating, human language groups. Other species had colonised alien worlds, of course, but humans have been doing it longer than almost anyone else, and had spread to many times more. For most of recorded history, it had been assumed humans had originally evolved on Coruscant — no primary evidence had survived, but that was the general feeling in any case. (There had been alternative theories, but those had been summarily quashed when, about three hundred years ago, the Columi had handed over sensor records of an early industrial society on what would become Coruscant dating to roughly a hundred thousand years ago.) Even before the advent of hyperdrive, their ancestors had flung out sleeper ships in all directions, to dozens of worlds. The descendents of the original settlers eventually spread to more worlds, bringing their language and culture with them.

Fascinatingly, all evidence suggested the ancient humans of Coruscant hadn't all spoken one language — the different cultural groups spread all across the galaxy spoke different, sometimes completely unrelated languages. Basic, the core of which was generally assumed to have evolved on Coruscant (though it has borrowed heavily from other languages both human and alien since), was seemingly related to the languages of Corellia, however distantly. Finding cognates could be a bit complicated, since they'd both borrowed from Duros languages, some of which were extinct in the modern day, but there were far too many phonological, syntactic, and lexical similarities for it to be coincidence. Similarly, Tionese and Kuati languages seemed to be related.

There was one example Cianen still couldn't get over. It had been repeatedly postulated that it was _possible_ human communities, when isolated on an alien world for long enough, might see enough genetic drift to eventually become a distinct species. Several alien species were far too similar to baseline humans for it to be coincidence, it had been frequently suggested they and humans had common ancestry. (They hadn't any original records on the sleeper ships or their destinations, after all.) One example were the Zeltrons, long assumed to be distant relatives, though genetic confirmation had been slow. Linguists at the time, though, quickly realized the majority language of Zeltros was, quite clearly, a member of the same family as Old Alderash — Zeltrons and Alderaanians were distant cousins. She'd first heard the story, how linguists had proved the existence of the extended human family before biologists had gotten there, when she'd been a small child, had had an enduring fascination for language ever since.

The original point, before she got distracted, was that Corellians and Alderaanians had once spoken completely unrelated languages. They'd gone extinct in favor of Basic millennia ago now, but the traditional languages were still preserved in names. It wasn't at all unreasonable for Onasi to recognize the name as Alderaanian.

Yes, back to the conversation. She had a bad habit of letting her mind wander. "Well, I apologize in advance for taking up space on your ship, Captain."

An expression of confusion crossed Onasi's face for a second, followed with a sharp guffaw of surprise. "No, no, I'm not a _navy_ captain. The _Spire_ 's commander is Artik Kre'laq." Hmm, that name _could_ be Caamasi, but they were hardly ever found in the military. Bothan was far more likely, for cultural reasons. "I'm with Starfighter Command."

"Ah." That did explain rather a lot, actually. A greater degree of minute-to-minute creativity was often prized in fighter pilots, the sort of individuality basic training was designed to squash more often than not nurtured instead. Onasi's slightly off-color presentation made perfect sense now. But anyway, "Picking up the civilian beneath the good Captain's dignity, I take it."

A smirk again twitched at Onasi's lips. "Something like that."

"Would it be safe to assume, given that he sent you in his place, that the two of you don't exactly get along?"

"Far be it from me to correct the fancy Alderaanian professor."

"Mm." The server wandered up around then, a Caamasi with almost glowing golden fur by the name of Araqos. When she'd first started wandering the District, she'd been a bit blindsided by how many places here had living waitstaff — at least throughout the core, droids were used almost exclusively. Perhaps the powerful, so thickly concentrated here like they were nowhere else, simply enjoyed having people to order about. Though, this place specifically, maybe they just felt like it. Caamasi could be weird like that sometimes. Onasi made his order easily enough — he did horridly mispronounce _ynari ak-qhuguel_ , but Araqos had to be used to aliens slaughtering Caamasi by now. The Jedi just waved Araqos off without a word, not even looking at him, still blandly staring at Cianen's collarbone.

Wow. _Rude_.

After mumbling an apology in Caamasi — Araqos just cheerfully brushed it off, wandered away again — Cianen turned back to the Jedi. And she smiled. It wasn't a _nice_ one, exactly, the sort of inoffensive smile that hid cruelty just beneath. It only took a week or two for her grad students to learn to fear this smile. Holding her hand out over the table, Cianen said, "And _you_ are?"

The Jedi didn't reach to take her hand. Instead, her eyes flicked down to it, almost seeming to glare. And, wow, _rude_ again. What was her problem? Voice low, flat, cold, "Bastila Shan." Cianen entirely forgot her planned mockery when she recognized the name.

She wasn't exactly a fan of the Jedi, but she still knew who this was. _Everybody_ knew who Bastila Shan was. A Kuati Jedi — at least, the name was Kuati, who knew where she was actually from — of this newest generation, come to Knighthood after the Mandalorian Wars. While still young, not as thoroughly accomplished as some other Jedi she could name, Shan had somehow made herself absolutely critical to the Republic war effort. Something the Jedi called "battle meditation", though Cianen had no clue what that was. Which was slightly irritating, actually, she _liked_ knowing things, but the Jedi could be infuriatingly vague about their own abilities. But even the hardest of skeptics could recognize the pattern: any battle where Bastila Shan happened to be present ended in the Republic's favor.

These days, it seemed their _only_ victories were (somehow, inexplicably) thanks to this one Jedi. It was...interesting, how people spoke of her these days. Disturbingly messianic at times, but still interesting.

Oh, not to mention, there was also that whole killing Revan business. Though apparently that had been more Kavar than Shan. But still.

Cianen remembered herself after a few seconds, letting her hand fall away. "Well. Are you sure you wouldn't rather order something, Master Jedi? You might just make Araqos's day. You know how his people can be about the Jedi."

"Araqos?"

"Our waiter. You know, the one you completely ignored."

Shan just stared back at her, eyes slightly narrowed.

The flash of annoyance was entirely unexpected, but Cianen didn't bother fighting it. "I wonder, do they give you Jedi etiquette lessons, or is teaching you to behave like people considered counterproductive?"

A storm of spluttering and coughing sounded from her right. Sounded like Onasi had snorted into his water. Shan shot in his direction what could _almost_ be considered a disgusted look, if it weren't buried under several kilometers of Jedi self-importance — excuse her, she meant _serenity_. After a second of not-glaring, Shan turned back to Cianen, shooting her would could _almost_ be considered an offended look, if it weren't blah blah blah. "I can see I'm not needed here. Until it is time to return to the _Spire_ , I will be at the Temple library. Finding something _productive_ to do." The Jedi swung up to her feet and swirled away, in something just shy of a huff.

Cianen watched her leave, shaking her head to herself. "Is she always like that?"

"Yes." The word was said with an impressive depth of weariness — Shan's attitude was apparently a frequent frustration for Onasi. "You get used to it."

She turned to the older man, a single eyebrow ticking up her forehead.

For a second he held out, sipping at his water again, but then he winced. "Okay, you don't, really. She's... Well, she's mostly holed up with the rest of the Jedi. You won't see very much of her, don't worry."

"Hmm." That was something at least. Though, the phrase _rest of the Jedi_ was less than reassuring, at least she wouldn't have to put up with Shan much at all. Dantooine wasn't really that far away, and then that would be that.

After all, it wasn't like the Republic could afford to have _Bastila Shan_ of all people babysitting linguistics professors poking about ruins.

* * *

Carth was more than a little surprised, walking into the flight officers' lounge, to spot their unusual guest already sitting at the game table.

It'd been a couple days now, and he still wasn't sure what to think of this Hayal woman. She was a civilian, one unapologetically critical of the Republic war effort at that, which would ordinarily find him predisposed to think less than flattering thoughts. Not only that, but she was an academic type, one whose every word and every gesture and every inch and every stitch gave every implication of privilege. He'd pegged her at a glance as the pampered daughter of some coreborn asshole riding high and arrogant on inherited wealth, at an overview of her background one who had thrown herself into scholarship simply because she couldn't imagine anything else to do with her life.

He'd met such types before. It never took them long to start grating on his nerves.

But something threw him off about Hayal. He couldn't put his finger on exactly what, it bothered him. For one thing, he _still_ didn't know what in the seven hells she was doing here. Sure, the Jedi had found some ruins outside their enclave on Dantooine, they wanted a qualified xenolinguist to look over the inscriptions there, and there were precious few institutions held in higher regard than the University of Aldera, fine. That did make sense...if you didn't look at it too hard. See, the University had a satellite campus on Generis, which happened to be in the same general area of the galaxy as Dantooine — Carth had checked, and they even had a sizeable archeology department. It would be far more convenient to pull specialists from there than all the way from Alderaan itself. Having her meet them in Coruscant was slightly odd, but it _was_ on the way from Alderaan to Dantooine, so not that strange, not so much as having them meet her at all.

Seriously, why the _fuck_ were they escorting her to Dantooine themselves? _Why?_ Why the _Endar Spire_ , why the entire battle group? It made _absolutely no sense_. Every second they spent shuttling this academic to Dantooine, a mission that had _nothing_ to do with the war effort, the Sith were advancing. Advances the Navy, without the advantage given by Bastila's damn magic tricks, had little hope of throwing back. Why, why, _why_ were they here?

For that matter, why were they transporting _just Hayal?_ If they had to see this diversion through, which was incomprehensible to begin with, but if they must, why only the _one_ expert? Surely, any archeological endeavor needed more than one person. He was hardly informed about such things at all himself, but even _he_ knew that. Would she be joining with a team out of Generis? That sort of made sense. But if they had their own team, why did they need Hayal at all? Surely they had their own xenolinguists. Was she simply that highly regarded in her field? He guessed that was possible, but she seemed a little young for it — it took time to develop that sort of expertise and authority, time she simply wasn't old enough to have had.

No. No, it didn't make any sense at all. Something else was at work here.

The problem was, he couldn't _begin_ to guess at what.

Not only did contradictions abound in their mission, but also in the woman herself. The few conversations he'd had with her so far, yes, she'd taken every opportunity to express disdain for the Republic leadership. But, at the same time, she'd shown himself and the servicemen aboard the Endar Spire nothing but respect. And the Jedi, considering she was a privileged academic, and the Jedi considered themselves scholars before anything else, one would expect them to...well, if not agree on anything, at least be civil. To put it lightly, yeah, not so much. For a second there, he'd been sure Hayal was going to punch Rast right in his self-righteous, sneering, condescending snout.

(He'd been disappointed when she'd just walked out in a dignified huff. He'd have paid good money to see that.)

He didn't know why it bothered him so much. It just did. There was something about what she was and what she so clearly believed that didn't quite...fit. He was missing something, some large facet of her identity, her purpose here, that would bring it all together, explain the grating juxtapositions that made up the confusing woman. He had no idea what it could be, couldn't even begin to guess.

Whatever it was, it would have to be something truly unexpected to explain _this_.

It wasn't unusual, not at all, for him to walk into the lounge to find his subordinates some distance into a sabaac game, and some distance further into their drinks. As long as things didn't get out of hand, he was inclined to allow it, and even encourage it — as horridly as the war was going, he'd take almost anything that could keep morale up. He'd participated in more than one game himself, though he wasn't a sabaac man, and never allowed himself to touch any drink with a drop of alcohol.

He'd seen a lot of...odd things, walking into the lounge. Confirming the prostitutes his men had _somehow_ snuck aboard weren't slaves remained one of the most humiliating experiences of his life. But he certainly hadn't expected to see Professor Cianen Hayal. In the middle of a rowdy game of sabaac with officers from both Starfighter Command and the Navy, the pink in her face and the width of her grin clear sign she'd had more than a couple drinks.

For a moment he just stood in the doorway, observing the scene with dumbfounded disbelief.

Finally, he shook himself. Nodding and waving back at the officers who called to him, he made his way toward the game table. He chose a chair occupied by Dynal, a naval officer he'd spoken to all of once, propped himself up against the back with both arms. "Professor."

Hayal glanced toward him, only her eyes moving. Her thin, delicate face, complete with the sloping Alderaanian nose, was held in something severe, distant — clearly her sabaac face. But her eyes were a warm brown, the mirth filling them almost visible from across the table. "Captain. I see you've decided to lower yourself to sit with the common officers." Hayal had one of those low, smooth voices, every syllable light and precise with an unmistakable upper-class coreworlds accent, only slightly slurred now by whatever she was drinking.

After letting the guffaws and gentle ribbing from that comment die down a little, he said, "I see you have. Didn't take you for a gambling woman, Professor."

"I'm not, truly." She shifted a little, settling herself more comfortably against the Bothan at her side. "It's more the company I'm interested in."

Carth cut another quick glance at the Bothan. And then immediately did a double-take, somehow stopping his mouth from dropping open. He still wasn't perfect at telling Bothans apart, but that... Was that _Asyr Lar'sym?_ The black silver fur, the piercings arrayed through her long right ear, Carth had had the Bothan woman practically forced on him as a squadron commander about a year ago now, and while he'd been a bit miffed about it at the time, he'd found he couldn't complain about it too much — she was, after all, _very_ good. But then, that was the way of Bothans, wasn't it, to be _very good_ at whatever it was they chose to do. While he'd mostly gotten over it by now, getting Lar'sym to do pretty much anything sociable with any of the rest of his pilots, even her own squadron, was an uphill battle. She could be found in the lounge sometimes, yes, but almost always by herself in a corner, perhaps talking to one or two others brave enough to approach the standoffish, bristly woman.

But then, that was the way of Bothans, wasn't it? They weren't exactly a sociable people. If a Bothan started being friendly with him, he'd know to start checking his back for knives slipped between his ribs.

But there she was, sitting next to Hayal at the game table. Not playing herself — her chair was set a bit back, no cards in hand — but present, which was itself unusual. Even more unusual, she... Well, when he'd walked in Hayal had been sitting an inch from leaning against Lar'sym's shoulder, and with that comment about the company that inch had disappeared. Lar'sym had shot a flat look at the top of Hayal's head but, with an almost exasperated huff, lifted her arm out of the way, moved it instead to drape over Hayal's shoulders, down her side. Then turned a threatening glare on the rest of the room, as though daring them to say anything.

Carth wouldn't dream of it, despite how... Well, they _did_ look a bit ridiculous, was all. Lar'sym was, well, a Bothan — while not a tall race, they were powerful, thick and muscular. The long, dense fur that covered them head to toe only made them look larger than they actually were. Hayal, on the other hand, was a tiny, scrawny little thing. He wasn't a tall man himself, but she _barely_ topped his shoulders, and he'd be shocked if she weighed much more than fifty kilos. Lar'sym might easily be twice her size. But, as odd as it was, it wasn't the first time he'd seen something of the like — interspecies couples could get like that sometimes.

Speaking of interspecies couples, were they...? Well, that hadn't taken very long. Hayal had barely even been on the ship for two days. He had no idea how the hell she'd managed to get through to Lar'sym so quickly, but good on her, he guessed.

Personally, he couldn't imagine sleeping with a Bothan. Mostly it was the claws. And the teeth. And everything around the teeth, for that matter — he still wasn't sure how exactly kissing was supposed to work when the other person was of a species with a prominent snout. Not to mention Bothans were, well, _Bothans_. They weren't exactly known for their warm and charming personalities. But, to each their own.

He'd been _more_ than distracted enough by that thought. Pulling himself back to the present moment, he nodded down to the table. "You seem to be doing just fine to me." Indeed she was. Gambling technically wasn't allowed in the Republic fleet, but it was perfectly fine if no money was actually changing hands — they didn't even use real chits, the game table instead projecting stacks of holographic ones before each player. Of the eight who had started, three were still in the game. He only even knew there had been eight to begin with from the text and images on the surface, three of the seats were empty, the defeated players having already left. Judging by the illusory chits before the three players, Hayal was far ahead, Ferlip was just barely comfortable, and Dynal would probably be wiped out in the next couple hands.

Hayal's lips tilted into a smirk. "I never said I wasn't good at it."

Grumbling into his cards, Dynal muttered, "Bloody lucky is what she is."

Despite how quiet he'd been, Lar'sym obviously heard him, letting out a thick snort, the fur of her face shifting in a wave. Carth knew Bothan expressions were mostly carried in those small flutterings, but he had absolutely no idea how to read any of it. Even though Hayal hadn't been looking, she had a better idea than he did. "Oh, don't mind him, _hjAsythe_. Few enough can remain graceful when faced with abject defeat."

One of the pilots, Carth didn't catch who, taunted, "So you know, she said it all bookish, but that was Cianen calling you a sore loser."

"I got that, thanks."

Carth stood and watched the next few hands pass, watching Hayal and his pilots. Trying to get what the fuck was going on here to make sense in his head. It didn't take very long for Dynal to be wiped out completely, and he stood to leave, grumbling to himself. Carth didn't entirely blame him — Hayal managed to draw into a negative twenty-one after the shift, lucky as hell. While Carth took the abandoned seat, Hayal and Ferlip quickly agreed the game was over. (That tended to happen when just playing for fun, sabaac didn't hold up nearly as well with only two players.) And the table switched off, the chits vanishing, displays going dark, the cards stacked before Ferlip returning to simple plastic.

Cards rapidly shuffling in hand, so quick they were but a blur in Carth's eyes, Ferlip asked, "Were we going again?" The words were quick, light, as Ferlip always spoke. Carth wasn't familiar with Ferlip's species — with how many peoples there were in the galaxy, knowing all of them was practically impossible. It was in his file, but Carth couldn't pronounce it. For that matter, nobody could pronounce his name properly either, but everyone just called him Ferlip. Carth wasn't entirely sure if "he" was even appropriate, he'd heard people use multiple different genders with Ferlip, and he never corrected anyone one way or the other. (Carth defaulted to masculine pronouns, just because.) Always struck Carth as vaguely avian, thin and delicate, with a long, pointy head, a thin coating of colorful purple and golden feathers, lightly dancing hands ending in noticeable points. He was quick as anything, with frankly inhuman reflexes and reaction times. Clever as hell, too. Which made Ferlip one of his best pilots, so when it came down to it he really didn't give a shit what species or gender he was.

A few others around the table quickly agreed. Hayal hesitated a moment, turned a bit to look up at Lar'sym. The Bothan let out a huff. Levering her shoulder a bit, forcing Hayal to sit up, there was a brief, muttered exchange between them, though Carth didn't understand a word — apparently, Hayal spoke Bothan. Then Lar'sym was on her feet, walking off toward the kitchen, Hayal turning back to the table. "Sure, I'm in for one more. Captain?"

It looked like a few others were moving to speak, but Ferlip got there first. Ferlip always got there first. "The Captain is a pazaac man."

Grinast, a couple seats around the table, said, "Fucking children's game, is what that is."

There was a bit of jeering at that, but Carth ignored it with the ease of long practice. "Ah, I can make an exception this once. I'm in."

For the first few hands, Carth was quiet, observing, working out the puzzle in his head. The conversation at the table was composed mostly of taunts and easy banter — his pilots were clearly comfortable with Hayal here, she'd apparently managed to insert herself as one of the group. It just didn't make a whole lot of sense. Lar'sym was strange enough. When she got back, a drink in each hand, Hayal went right back to leaning against her, sometimes flipping up her cards, muttering to each other in Bothan. That didn't make any sense, far as Carth had managed to read her Lar'sym was acting wildly out of character, but nothing else about this made any sense either.

He wasn't saying it was outside of the realm of possibility a passenger could get along with his people so easily. He just didn't get how _Hayal_ had done it. Far as he'd put together so far, she was a pampered academic type. Civilians didn't get more civilian. But she'd slipped herself right in as though it were nothing, his people accepting her presence with apparently very little objection.

It was weird. It bothered him.

Finally, when it was his turn to deal, Carth decided he'd been quiet long enough. "So, Cianen," he said, shuffling. He'd noticed his pilots were calling her by her first name, had decided to follow along.

A single narrow eyebrow ticked up, a hint of a smile playing at her lips. "Yes, Captain?"

Carth blinked at the title for a second, then shrugged it off. After all, even when in very casual settings like this one, his pilots still observed the proprieties with him — she was probably following their lead, just as he was. "You're a bit of a puzzle, aren't you."

Hayal's eyes widened, showing every hint of polite surprise. The shade of a smirk kinda gave the game away, though. "Am I?"

"You can't expect I find people like you in here playing sabaac all the time." He started dealing out the cards, two to each player, the thin plastic sliding across the table until slapped down or snapped up.

Hayal let hers slide right off the table, deftly catching them before they fell in her lap. "I don't expect you have people like me on this ship very often at all." She did have a point there. Military capital ships didn't make a habit of ferrying professors around during war time.

A series of calls and bets made its way around, the table moving the holographic chits around at the players' command. When it came time to start the roll, Carth didn't start dealing out the new cards immediately, flicking the top one between his fingers. "Where does a linguistics professor from the University of Aldera pick up sabaac, anyway?" He passed out another round of cards. The players all locked in their cards, not really in any order, but whenever each had made their decision.

Carth was slightly surprised when Liera put down and locked her entire hand. It did make a sort of sense, though. By the rules they played, the cards would all be randomised exactly once, after the next round of betting. The exception were any cards played face-up — they wouldn't change, but everyone at the table could see what they were. Everyone was required to roll one card face-up, but any more than that was optional. Liera _had_ locked in a good hand, adding up to twenty-two, which made it likely she'd win this one, but everyone else would know she was likely to win, which meant she'd also likely killed the rest of the betting. The take would be practically guaranteed, but less than it could be.

Like he had, Hayal didn't roll a card down right away, staring across the table at him. "You'd be surprised what grad students get up to." There was a bit of good-natured ribbing and chuckling at the obvious suggestiveness on her voice. She shook her head, locking in an eight of staves. "Really though, I picked it up back at home. An elder cousin taught me, used to bring me around to the cantina in the local spaceport."

Somehow, Carth really couldn't imagine Hayal of all people slumming it in a seedy spaceport cantina. Unless it was Alderaan, he guessed — he didn't think Alderaan really had seedy...well, anything. The wealthier of the coreworlds could be like that. Before the game could move on, Carth asked, "Which world?"

"Shelkonwa. My family are all farmers, I'm the first to even really make it offworld in generations. Though, most of my cousins are Republic military now, I suppose. Where are we going next in this little interrogation?"

Carth frowned to himself. Ignoring the few comments from the rest of the players, he waved for them to get going again, started passing out additional cards to those who asked for them. And tried again, futilely, to figure out what in the hell was going on.

Because, see, Hayal was obviously lying.

Oh, it was pretty enough of a story, explained a fancy professor being comfortable, well, doing _this_ , quite neatly. But it was clearly a lie. He knew of Shelkonwa — it was in the Colonies, settled before the Republic by Alderaan, had remained a largely agrarian world over the millennia. The problem was, Hayal wasn't _at all_ what he expected of someone from Shelkonwa. For one thing, her accent was completely wrong. She spoke clear, clipped, upper-class Basic, the sort of thing one only heard from natives of the wealthier core worlds, a privileged few from well-to-do families throughout the rim, and the Jedi. For all that Shelkonwa was a very old and well-off world, the people boasting all the benefits of an advanced social economy, it was still an agrarian world, with all that entails. He guessed Hayal could have gone to some effort to cover her native accent, but it felt too natural to him, too precise.

Not to mention, she didn't _look_ like she should, if her story were true. She'd said her parents were farmers, which meant, obviously, she would have grown up on one. Children growing up on a farm tend to help with the work — and, even with modern technology, it tends not to be the easiest work in the galaxy. But, for all that there was a subtle hint of toned muscle along the visible length of her forearms, Carth had the very clear impression Hayal had never seen a day of manual labor in her life. She was just...too _clean_. He didn't mean he would expect her to still have dirt on her years later, no, it...well, it was most obvious on her hands. Her fingers clearly visible, lightly holding her cards, it was clear she hardly had any calluses at all. Certainly not what he would expect to see, years later. No scars from the litany of nicks and scratches she should have gotten either. The skin of her arms and face was pale and clear, absent even the slightest signs of sun damage. None of it made any sense at all.

Unless she had undergone thorough cosmetic treatments to erase any sign of her relatively harsher youth, anyway — that certainly was possible. But, those kinds of treatments were _extremely_ expensive, expensive enough he doubted a junior professor, even one with the University of Aldera, would be able to afford it.

No, put all together, that she was lying was the simpler explanation.

But... _why?_ That was the real problem. And, for all his thinking about it over the next few hands, he couldn't even begin to guess at an explanation.

Not that he thought she was a threat. No, the Jedi had requested her presence specifically, and she would have been thoroughly vetted before being let anywhere near the _Endar Spire_. At the very least, he was certain the Jedi knew what was going on, and probably someone somewhere up the chain of command as well. He just had no clue what it could be.

And it bothered him.

He never did get back to what Hayal had (accurately) called an interrogation. There wasn't any point asking questions when he knew she was just going to lie to him.

* * *

The shift in the sound of her breathing was a subtle thing, nearly covered by the low rumble of a large ship in hyperspace. Subtle, but Cianen caught it all the same. She glanced toward the bed, Asyr visible in the light from her datapad as only a fuzzy outline. Not quite awake then, alright. Cianen sat back in her seat, returned to her reading.

She'd been trying to prepare however she could for the job the Jedi had recruited her for. The problem was, there wasn't much preparation to do. She'd read absolutely everything in the University records on the history of Dantooine; she'd managed to do that during only the two days she'd been on this ship, because there simply wasn't that much of it. Dantooine had only been discovered in the last century. The world was one of the few in this era to be surveyed by the Republic, and had thus been left open for colonization to whomever could get themselves there — given the climate and how isolated the world was, it had attracted a few farmers and not much else.

It was discovered a few years into the settlement that the Republic survey had been less than thorough: Dantooine was already inhabited by a sapient species. The Dantari, as they'd been named, were a mostly pastoral people, the small population divided into dozens of nomadic tribes. So far as anyone could tell, they had very little in the way of technology, hadn't even mastered agriculture. While seemingly peaceful — there had been zero reports of Dantari attacking settlers, and there was no evidence they even fought amongst themselves — they were very skittish, giving any offlander settlement a wide berth, fleeing at first sight. No attempts at contact so far had been successful, they always ran.

Curiously, the Dantari appeared to be human, or at least near-human. There were theories the Dantari were descendants of a lost colonization attempt, probably tens of thousands of years ago, given the loss of sophistication and the clear signs of genetic drift. While nobody had been able to confirm it yet, what with the Dantari always running away before anyone could get a blood sample, just by their appearance it seemed very likely.

The problem was, there was _absolutely no record_ of a human settlement on the world. Or even in the whole sector! If anyone were to have colonized Dantooine in the (comparatively) recent past, it would have been the Anx — their worlds were focused in this sector, after all. When the Jedi founded their enclave there a few decades ago, they had claimed they were building it on the site of the ruins of a much older enclave abandoned centuries ago but, again, there was absolutely no evidence of that. The enclave _was_ built on old ruins, yes, complete with a system of artificial catacombs running deep underground, but the assumption these were ruins of an old Jedi site were seemingly erroneous. According to the records the Jedi had given her, even their own scholars cast doubt on the idea.

It was _possible_ the ruins under the enclave and the ruins bearing the inscriptions she'd been recruited to translate had been built by the same people. She just had no idea who they could be. The Dantari seemed an unlikely candidate. Given the location of Dantooine within the galaxy, other possibilities were the Gree or an ancient race known to the Jedi as the Kwa, both of which had been present in the region before the formation of the Republic. (Cianen had never even heard of the Kwa before, she should really consider making copies of as much of the Jedi-hoarded knowledge she could get her hands on while she still could.) If it were these Kwa, this job might take quite a while — the Jedi only had a tiny handful of artefacts, they'd never managed to crack their language.

There were a handful of other possibilities, spacefaring civilizations old enough to have built the ruins, old enough to have been active before the Anx started exploring the area. The problem was, nothing was local. From what she could tell, while the Gree and the Kwa were the closest neighbors, neither had expanded as far as Dantooine. No other known civilization had been anywhere even close.

Which wasn't outside the realm of possibility, for the ruins to have been built by an unknown ancient civilization. There were unidentified relics from thousands of worlds, unending question marks the galaxy over. The problem was, well, she seriously doubted she'd be able to translate these inscriptions the Jedi had referred to. Unless they got seriously lucky and it turned out to be Gree, or else some other previously deciphered language, it was pretty much hopeless. Without a litany of other sources, a few dozen other minds chipping away at the project, and at least a few decades to do it in...

Interpreting a previously unknown language wasn't exactly easy, after all. Far too often it was quite simply impossible.

Of course, the Jedi should know that well enough. Which really made her wonder, not for the first time, exactly what they wanted with her. Because she wasn't sure dragging her out here could be justified by their stated reasoning.

Not that Cianen really expected anything the Jedi did to make perfect sense. Not the point.

Finally, she heard a shuffling from behind her, the soft hiss of fur against sheets. Her voice thick and low with sleep, Asyr muttered, " _Hjanethe?_ How long you been up reading?"

"Oh, a couple hours." Cianen was aware she had a rather horrid accent in Harishye, the standard dialect of government and media and education in Bothan space — the human throat simply wasn't up to distinguishing the fine differences in vowel quality reliably. But no matter how off she might sound, it was close enough to be understood, and that was all that really mattered. "I read quite a lot, you know. You could even say it's what I do."

Asyr let out a low grunt, the rumbling, growling sort of thing Cianen would just hurt herself trying to imitate. "Get back in here."

Smiling to herself, she spun the chair around. Asyr was still mostly invisible in the darkness, the curves of her body only vague shadows. One eye was open, catching the light from her datapad, glowing white with reflected radiance. "Don't you have to report in twenty minutes?"

She had to imagine Asyr's confused frown. There was a bit more shuffling, Asyr rolling away, reaching to turn the chrono around. And she jerked, springing to her feet an instant later, and started for the fresher. " _Ghysin ve shrallak anthe_ —" Cianen did understand that, of course, profanity simply wasn't always translatable. "—how long were you going to let me sleep?" Asyr clicked the light on, let out a sharp hiss at the assault on her eyes. Hers already adjusted by the datapad, Cianen took the opportunity to stare. Asyr hadn't gotten to dressing yet, and she wasn't bad to look at, after all. But she disappeared into the fresher soon enough.

"I wouldn't have let you sleep too late." Putting the datapad into standby, Cianen moved toward the fresher herself, peeked in. Right, Asyr was in the sonic already. She always thought species with fur looked so funny in there, countless hairs fluttering wildly with each wave pulse. Like a kitten in a windstorm. Not that she would ever say that out loud, Asyr certainly wasn't the type who would appreciate that sort of comment. "It's not like you really have to be there early. How much time does it take you to get ready in the morning, anyway?"

"You are an evil, evil woman."

Cianen just grinned. Reaching for her brush, sitting where she'd left it on the rim of the sink, she turned to the mirror and started—

Her smile instantly vanished. She lifted her chin up and to the right, stretching out her neck. She took a breath in and out through her teeth, and then another, fighting the sudden flare of annoyance rising in her throat.

There were risks involved in sexual encounters with people of different species from one's own — and she wasn't talking about the kind that required treatment for particular infections. No, quite simply each species had only evolved to couple with others of their own kind. Obviously. There were always incompatibilities, some minor, some insurmountable. Some species didn't really have sex at all, some did only to reproduce and didn't find it particularly pleasurable, sex for some species was so wildly _different_ they and humans simply couldn't see eye to eye, so to speak. It wasn't unusual for people to be allergic to each other — Cianen herself was hypersensitive to even indirect contact with eleven different species that she knew of, the reaction severe enough sleeping with any of them simply wasn't thinkable.

Some people could get a bit more, ah, aggressive than humans were really built to handle. In some cases, humans would be seriously risking their lives, but it only rarely got that bad. For Bothans, and a litany of other species of similar physiology, the problem mostly involved claws and teeth. Cianen had known this going in, had come with a list of ground rules. She'd expected she'd get scratched up a bit. She hadn't examined herself too thoroughly, and it could be easy to lose track in the moment, but judging by what she could see in the mirror right now and the stinging where she couldn't, shoulders, all down her back, stomach, arse, and thighs.

Asyr was thorough, after all.

Cianen didn't particularly mind all that. As long as Asyr properly washed her hands first, it wasn't really a problem. To be perfectly honest, it was part of the reason she'd been open to Asyr in the first place. A few of them had gone a little deeper than she would like — she hadn't missed the blood on the sheets — and it could make sitting down or wearing anything at all a bit uncomfortable at times, but it wasn't that big of a deal. It'd all be healed in a week or two anyway. Worth it, in her mind.

This _one_ line, though. This one was high enough it wasn't really her shoulder anymore. This one, a thread of torn skin white and inflamed pink, a few tiny beads of dried blood here and there, this one was on her neck. High enough it would probably be visible.

And she was annoyed. Not at Asyr, exactly — okay, well, maybe a little bit. But with herself, that she hadn't been paying attention, with everyone she just _knew_ would stare or make some inane comment. This was going to be a pain, until it was properly healed and everyone could talk to her normally again. Without something else very clearly on their minds. _And_ it would still be there when she got to Dantooine. Lovely first impression of her the Jedi there were going to get, wasn't it?

With another sigh, Cianen set to getting herself presentable, grumbling to herself in her head.

After barely a few seconds, Asyr was out, slipping behind her. She took slightly longer getting out of the fresher than entirely necessary, Cianen could see in the mirror her eyes were wandering. Cianen felt herself unconsciously straighten, but ignored it, kept sorting her hair. Her voice a hissing drawl that put a smirk on Cianen's face, Asyr said, "An evil woman." And she was gone, walking into the room proper.

Cianen set down her things and followed after her. Pointing at the scratch on her neck, "I'm an evil woman? You did this one on purpose."

"Yes." The flat, matter-of-fact delivery nearly made Cianen laugh. She wasn't even looking at her, more focused on slipping into her uniform. Cianen was distracted watching her for a second, then jumped for her own clothes — she couldn't even get out into the unsecured halls by herself, she'd need to follow Asyr. "That was punishment."

"Punishment? What for?"

"For teasing me in front of the others."

Cianen let out a huff. Okay, she'd known even at the time that had been over the line. But she'd been a little drunk, she hadn't been _entirely_ aware of what she'd been saying. Asyr was the one who kept bringing her drinks, didn't seem like that was her fault now, did it? "Oh, like they'll even remember me two weeks from now."

"You might be surprised. I haven't made a reputation for being personable." Tying her boots, Asyr glanced up at her. The hairs of her long face had shifted, settled into something Cianen read as amused. "They don't know what this is, you see. You're an evil, evil woman. You just want me for my private quarters."

She rolled her eyes. Of course, Asyr wasn't _entirely_ wrong — she wouldn't deny the idea of getting to share her private room had been a contributing factor. Cianen had been stuck with an insufferably energetic and simple-minded ensign, she'd spent maybe five minutes in Ulgo's presence before she'd been overwhelmed with the need to be far, _far_ away. (What the hell was an Ulgo even _doing_ here, anyway? Whatever, didn't matter.) Asyr, as a squadron commander, got her own room. It was a tiny, ascetic little thing, but still. But, well, if Cianen had just wanted to crash in someone's special single-person room, Asyr was hardly the only option.

So, slightly petulantly, she said, "That's not the _only_ reason." She barely knew Asyr, they'd just met a couple days ago, but she rather liked her so far. She was just...refreshingly blunt. Many Bothans could get that way, almost obsessively matter-of-fact in all things, just part of the warrior culture bit, they weren't the only ones. (Actually, Asyr wasn't even the first Bothan she'd been with, but that was beside the point.) Asyr was just, she didn't know, she had a way of saying things she found amusing. Combined with being not at all hard on the eyes, and the usual almost pathological down-to-earth-ness of her people, well.

It wasn't like she'd _needed_ to find someone on the ship. She was shagging Asyr because she amused her and she wanted to. It really was that simple.

But there was no real point saying all that. Asyr had probably guessed near enough anyway. "And hey, you only want me because I won't get all sappy."

Asyr smirked at that. The toothless kind of smirk, not a hint of white peeking through — in most cultures that had them, after all, showing teeth was considered a threat. Or flirtatious, she supposed, depending on the species and the context, but the human smile was actually very weird, xenosociologically speaking. "That is refreshing. Too many people make things more than what they are. Humans are particularly bad about that, most of the time."

Well, yes, she was well aware humans were a comparatively emotional people. Especially when it came to sexual relationships. There was a reason she tried to avoid her own species when it came to this sort of thing. "And everyone knows Bothans are particularly sweet and cuddly. Fact."

Asyr gave her a hard look, but didn't dignify that one with a response.

* * *

Bothan culture — _For the record, I have altered Bothan culture significantly. In my head, they will end up much as they are in the canon Rebellion / New Republic, after gradual evolution during the Great Peace of the Republic._

[What the hell was an Ulgo even doing here, anyway?] — _For those who don't know, House Ulgo happens to be one of the Alderaanian noble families (like Organa)._

* * *

 _The first scene was first posted in "Back Burner" some time ago. The rest is new._


	3. Endar Spire — I

When it happened, Cianen was reclined on a sofa on an observation deck, pouring through samples of the Kwa written language the Jedi had handed over.

She wasn't entirely sure why modern ships, especially military vessels, still had these things. Once upon a time, a fair portion of navigation and such was done by sight, but it had been millennia since that had actually been necessary. Early sensors could be rather easily scrambled, they'd placed rooms with a view of space near the guns, marking and assigning targets manually, but that was virtually unheard of these days. What had once been a necessary, functional feature had become increasingly decorative, until they were reduced to rooms like these. A small space, yes, but holding nothing but couches and chairs, turned toward the shifting blue and white maelstrom of hyperspace.

It was pretty, of course, but Cianen wasn't sure why they bothered. Seemed like a frivolous use of resources, really.

As was her attempt at deciphering the Kwa script. It was obviously phonemic — in the few dozen brief texts the Jedi had recovered, she'd identified sixty-three different glyphs, which seemed like rather a lot for an alphabet, but far too few for a logographic system. (At least, she thought it was sixty-three, they did string together a bit.) But, well, that meant it was completely bloody hopeless. It was simply impossible to crack a phonemic script without any bilingual texts. Even if it were logographic, deciphering it would take decades of work and a _lot_ of luck. (Not to mention a far larger corpus than she had to work with.) It was pretty to look at, anyway. The Kwa had taken angled, geometric shapes and somehow given them an almost organic flow, so subtle she couldn't quite pinpoint exactly what about the script gave her that impression. It was fascinating.

But it wasn't enough to distract her from the unanswered questions, floating distractingly around her head.

The Jedi claimed they wanted her to translate something they'd found on some ruins for them. Fine, but it wasn't quite that simple. They had their own experts. Even if they wanted to borrow someone from the University of Aldera, there were people more qualified and more conveniently located.

Why her?

The task they claimed they wanted her to accomplish, judging by the little they'd told her about it, was impossible. Quite simply, impossible. But the Jedi weren't idiots — they had their own experts, after all. They had to _know_ it was impossible.

She was becoming increasingly convinced they were making the whole thing up. They wanted her for something else.

But what was it? Why her?

They were ferrying her to where they wanted her. All right, fine — that in itself wasn't unusual at all. An entire Republic battle group, though, was an absolutely absurd escort for one measly little university professor. It made absolutely no sense. Especially since it happened to be the one _Bastila Shan_ , that self-important Jedi savior of the Republic, was attached to. Sending this much firepower to _Dantooine_ , of all places? No, it didn't make _no_ sense, it made _inverse_ sense, it was pure blithering idiocy.

She didn't understand.

More, they had to know she wasn't an idiot herself. She did have a litany of references and an impressive _curriculum vitae_ for her age, they _had_ to know. They had to know she'd put it together quickly, that something else was going on. In the Jedi's eyes, the few times she'd ever been in a room with any of them, she could almost see it. They knew she wasn't fooled. But still they played along with the fiction she'd been told, and she played along with it too, despite everyone involved knowing it was a lie, and knowing everyone else knew it was a lie. And she just...

She didn't see what possible advantage there could be in any of this. The Republic and the Jedi both had far more important affairs to concern themselves with, she couldn't imagine what they thought they could gain through...

She _didn't understand_.

Perhaps more than anything else, she _hated_ not understanding things. It ate away at her. She'd been trying to avoid thinking about the puzzle as much as she could, the last couple days.

But she couldn't always help it. Alone in the observation deck, save for her datapad and the ineffable chaos of hyperspace, her insatiable mind found itself wandering.

So, perhaps it wasn't much of a surprise she hadn't been focusing very well at all on her "work". Perhaps it wasn't much of a surprise that, when the flickering blue and white miasma fell away, stars appearing as blurred streaks only to refine into hard points in the sharp blackness of deep space, Cianen noticed immediately that they'd decanted from hyperspace hours before they should be making their next course change. When the intercom came on, Cianen caught the whole thing, from the very first word.

And, as she darted off toward where she knew she could get to the balcony over the briefing room at the center of the ship, she wasn't the least bit surprised the whole thing appeared to be going off the rails.

After all, even if she hadn't been able to begin to guess what, she'd always been expecting _something_ would happen.

* * *

"No. This is a terrible idea."

Every sense of serenity, of tolerant superiority, of general Jedi self-righteousness, disappeared in an instant, leaving Shan's face hard and cold. "Forgive me, Professor, but I was not aware you were an expert in military tactics."

Cianen bit her lip, by some miracle managing to hold back the insult on her tongue.

The briefing room had cleared out already, everyone run off to carry out their role in this folly, leaving only Cianen and a few Jedi. They had gathered in the center of the room, risers crawling upward in a semicircle around them, the projection of Shan's battle plan suspended over their heads. The other two Jedi, whose names Cianen had semi-intentionally forgotten, were mostly keeping the stereotypical detached Jedi calm, but Shan was glaring at her, the lights of the hologram painting sharp shadows across her face.

Before the sight of the little idiot made Cianen say something she might regret later, she glanced back up at the projection. But that didn't make her _less_ annoyed. The hologram depicted Taris — poor, unfortunate Taris, punted back and forth during the Mandalorian wars and now this nonsense, the place couldn't catch a break. In perilously low orbit over the planet was a split-hulled, curved ship Cianen recognized as an interdictor. The _Leviathan_ , Malak's flagship, trailed by two triangular monstrosities, she didn't remember what those were called. They were big ships, anyway. In flashing blue and green above them, trapping them against the planet, was a whole web of ships — the battlegroup Cianen was hitching a ride with, along with a few other ships they were picking up from somewhere.

See, the Republic had stumbled on intelligence, Shan hadn't said where they'd gotten it from, that Malak would be visiting Taris. Something to do with chastising the local governor, not important. Malak always liked to make a dramatic production of this sort of thing — he particularly liked parking in an impractically low orbit, just to make himself all big and intimidating in the sky. This put him far into the planet's gravity well, he wouldn't be able to break to hyperspace with any kind of speed.

Shan wanted to use that to take him out. She was going to take as many ships as she could as quickly as she could, wait out of system for Malak to show up, then appear in the sky above him once he's stuck in low orbit. Malak would be unable to escape, unable to even properly maneuver to counter her. They'd pound them into pieces, Malak would be dead, and the war would be over.

But there was...well, there were numerous problems with that idea. Just during the briefing, Cianen, _the civilian without any military experience at all_ , had come up with a few. How about the fact that the plan depended on utmost secrecy? That meant they were going deep into Sith territory with absolutely no backup. If anything unexpected happened, they were fucked.

She had more. In order to get there in time to hit Malak, they had to go _very_ soon. That meant they couldn't wait to gather an overwhelming force. They'd be going with what they had, maybe a few ships Shan could pick up on the way. Cianen wasn't convinced that was enough. Malak's escort might only be two ships, but they were _big_ ships, and his flagship wasn't anything to sneeze at either. Shan's battlegroup had a larger _number_ of ships, but they had none even approaching that size, and Cianen didn't know if they had any firepower advantage at all. If they'd gotten the size of Malak's escort wrong, if Malak's people even got a few lucky shots, they were fucked.

And not done yet, either. To get into range to hit Malak in low orbit, they'd have to descend a bit into Taris's gravity well themselves. What was the problem with that? Oh, she wasn't an _expert in military tactics_ , but couldn't Malak just do the _same thing back at them_? He could have _hundreds_ of ships floating in the vast blackness between stars. It had to be possible, Shan's plan depended on the Republic fleet doing _that exact thing_. Which wouldn't be too much of a risk if Taris were a border planet, but it _wasn't_ , it was firmly in Sith territory. Shan thought she was springing the trap, but Cianen couldn't suppress the thought they were walking into one.

Finally, she thought this was important to mention, _she had never signed on for this!_ She wasn't a soldier, she was a fucking _linguist!_ They were supposed to be bringing her to Dantooine, not dragging her into full-blown space battles!

She took a slow breath in, tried to force her own impatience out on the exhale. "Have you considered the possibility, Master Jedi, that this is a trap?"

The arrogant young woman shrugged, flicking one hand dismissively in the air. "It doesn't matter."

"It does—" Cianen choked on her own throat for a second. "It _doesn't matter?!"_

"Yes, Professor Hayal. It does not matter. It could be a trap, yes. I do not think it likely," the Jedi said, with a sense of no small amount of condescension yet absolutely none of irony, "but I will not deny it is possible. But it _does not matter_. Even if it is a trap, we haven't had an opportunity like this in some time. If there is a chance that we can neutralize Darth Malak, no matter how flawed, we _must_ take it."

For a few seconds, Cianen could only stare at the Jedi, Bastila bloody Shan, in numb disbelief. That was one of the stupidest things she'd ever heard an adult person say.

And she'd been roped into teaching the freshman seminar a few times. She'd heard some impressively stupid shit.

She _could_ point out that Malak likely knew just how desperate the Republic was to eliminate him, making it only _more_ likely it was a trap. She _could_ point out the assumption they were making that killing Malak would end the war was flawed — people had said the same thing when they'd assassinated Revan, and how had that turned out? Yeah, that's what she'd thought.

They'd lost Revan, and they'd kept fighting. _Revan_. Sure, she had been one of the greatest military strategists the Republic had ever seen, enough to beat the Mandalorians at their own game, but it hadn't been just that that had allowed one Jedi to split the Republic near in half. She hadn't coerced so much of the Republic military into following her, the vast majority of worlds in Sith space had never been conquered. People had followed Revan because they wanted to. For all the Jedi might lecture about the corruption of the Dark Side, how terrible and evil Revan had become, by all accounts she'd been a sympathetic and charismatic leader to the many peoples disaffected with the Republic, the Empire under her rule, so far as such authoritarian governments went, really quite fair and reasonable toward its people. They'd _loved_ Revan. Malak was a petulant child playing at tyrant after her, there was no comparison. They _would_ keep fighting without him.

If anything, knocking off Malak might be _good_ for the Empire. Revan had been, again, charismatic and reasonable. Malak was anything but. He didn't have the restraint Revan had shown, indiscriminately destroying anything and anyone that showed the barest sign of resistance, slaughtering people by the millions. The Empire might be winning militarily, but they'd lost every inch of moral high ground they'd claimed to have; the people had loved Revan, but Malak was almost universally despised. Whoever seized the reins of the Empire after his death, Cianen doubted they would be nearly as corrupt and bloodthirsty as Malak. She wouldn't be surprised if, after the dust settled, the Empire ended up _more_ stable than it'd been before.

Assuming it didn't tear itself apart, anyway. Unlike Revan, Malak had no clear successor. Sith space descending into civil war was definitely possible. Which, far from resolving it, would only _increase_ the violence scourging the galaxy.

Stellar planning right there, Master Jedi. Just brilliant.

But there was no point arguing about it any further. Shan clearly had no intention of listening to her, and the rest of the Jedi seemed equally unconcerned. Arrogant fools, they were going to get them all killed. But that was Jedi for you, she guessed, they were in the business of getting other people killed.

"Fine, then," she grumbled, resisting the urge to curse and throw her hands in the air. "Could you at least drop me off somewhere first?"

"I'm afraid that won't be possible."

Cianen took in and out _another_ long breath, the taste of it hot and bloody. "Why not? In case you've forgotten, war isn't exactly my specialty."

All four Jedi shifted a little, a brace of odd looks flicking across their faces too quickly for her to make out. One of them, a tall Iphigini with beads of ceramic and shining metals braided into the long hairs drooping from her face, took a step forward, a bony hand coming softly to rest on her arm. Cianen barely managed to stop herself from shrugging it off. "I am sorry, Professor," she sang. "I know you didn't agree to this, but we cannot leave you behind. The task force is running black — no transmissions in or out, nobody coming or leaving. We are even to avoid decanting within range of any planetary sensors. We cannot go into any system, not for even a second. If Malak finds out we changed our plans, he might grow suspicious. There is no quicker way to guarantee our assault at Taris will be a failure."

She opened her mouth to argue, then cut off, biting her lip. They were determined. Pointing out that the Empire's plants would already have reason to be suspicious when they didn't turn up at their next port wouldn't bend them. "Just don't take me into the battle, then. Leave me in a shuttle or escape pod or something outsystem."

"And if the battle goes badly, and we must flee? We may not have the opportunity to return to pick you up again."

Cianen grit her teeth, rubbed at her forehead with a hand, hard enough her vision blurred. There was nothing she could do. The Jedi wouldn't listen, the officers would yield to them, Cianen wasn't a good enough of a slicer to escape or even get a message out. She was screwed. "You know, if you get me killed my parents will hit the Republic with one hell of a wrongful death suit."

Again, the Jedi gave her a set of peculiar looks. Her voice hard, Shan said, "Martial law was declared shortly after Revan betrayed the Republic. The military is exempt from any liability for the duration."

She scoffed. Theoretically, sure, but rules like that could be bent — especially since the Chancellor just declaring he has broad executive powers like he did is flagrantly unconstitutional, making the _emergency measures themselves_ illegal. She and her parents might be having problems, had for most of her life, but that didn't change anything, they would and _could_ —

The thought broke off before she could finish it, and she was left frowning at herself. They could do nothing. They might _want_ to, sure, but they were just common farmers. They hadn't the influence to make themselves heard. The suit would be dismissed out of hand, and that would be that.

Cianen shook her head to herself, though the odd feeling lingered, unease tingling at the back of her neck. "Well, I, ah... It's obvious I'm not going to be able to convince you how completely idiotic this whole thing is, so...that's that, then."

The Jedi didn't seem to have anything to say to that — though, by the narrow, angry set of her eyes, Shan at least certainly wanted to — and Cianen didn't wait to see if they'd come up with anything. She turned on her heel and walked off in the general direction of the pilots' lounge, where she could get herself a bloody drink.

The Jedi's eyes on her back only made that uncomfortable tingling worse.

* * *

 _He turned her lightsaber aside with a flourish, stepping forward to drive his shoulder into her chest. She hit the ground hard, her breath leaving with a harsh cough, the dull white of her weapon going out as the hilt spun from her hand. But the fight wasn't done, she didn't stop until she was stopped, Alek turned back around, thrust out for her heart._

 _Her dark eyes flashing, Lesami brought both hands halfway up, pulling at the Force so hard his face tingled, slapped them down to the ground at her sides. There was a hiss from the pool directly behind her, the rest all around, and the air was suddenly filled with fog, cool grey blankness pressing so thick against his face he couldn't see a damn thing. He stumbled, scrambled back, reached out, not to wipe the fog away, there wouldn't be time for that, he had to find her before she—_

 _She suddenly appeared out of the fog, grabbing at his wrist, tore the hilt from his grip before he could react. He tried to step away, but she was on him in an instant, knee aiming to strike between his legs. Twisting out of the way, he stepped around her back, an arm coming around her neck. She tried to slip away, but he tightened his grip, locking his hand behind his opposite elbow. Both of her hands had gotten under his arm somehow, stopping him from putting too much pressure on her throat, but she couldn't escape, no matter how much she tried to kick at his legs, no matter how much she squirmed against him._

 _Which was really quite distracting. He'd been...noticing Lesami a bit more than he should, lately. But he forced himself to stay focused as best he could._

 _By the time Lesami gave up, slumping in his arms, both of them were breathing heavily, sweat tickling its way down his back. Her voice thin and breathless, Lesami said, "Do you yield?"_

 _He laughed, the sound high and weak. "Me? What fight are you in?"_

 _From so close his ear twinged, there was a very familiar snap-hiss to his right. He glanced that way to find the faded white glow of a lightsaber on the practice setting, floating in the air inches from his face. "This one." He could hear the smirk on her voice, as clear as though he were looking at it._

 _Keeping his arm firm, Alek looked around them, trying to find his lightsaber. Dammit, where the hell had it gone? He took a slow breath, reached through himself and out, grasping for the hilt Lesami was levitating somewhere over his head. He found it after a moment, tried to wrench it away, but no matter how hard he shoved at the damn thing, it stayed perfectly still, the blade unwavering, humming hard in his ear._

 _He sighed. "Fine, you win."_

 _The grin she gave him as soon as she was free wasn't helping that...not noticing her thing._

 _A moment later, they were laid out on a rock in the middle of one of the pools, the air thick with the scent of green and the sound of falls striking the water surface. The thin mist was comfortably cool against his flushed skin, the gentle glow against the leaves over their heads, the glass ceiling further above dim enough he could fall asleep if not for the light burns the practice setting left, his off arm and ankle throbbing. Not that he could complain about that, really, he was sure Lesami had it worse — for all that he couldn't hope to compete with her in the Force, he was still better with a lightsaber._

 _Though his advantage even there was slowly shrinking. Lesami just learned too damn fast._

 _They laid there for a few minutes in silence, but eventually Lesami spoke, slightly thick with pain. "I think I'm going to the clinic in a few minutes. I managed to win twice at least, but damn, Alek, that thing hurts, you know."_

" _Once."_

" _Twice."_

" _Once. That last one doesn't count. You cheated."_

 _Lesami snorted. "If it were a real fight, you'd be too dead to call me a cheater."_

 _There was really nothing to say to that — he had no doubt Lesami would wipe the floor with him if she weren't at least trying to keep to a proper lightsaber duel. She could probably turn him into bloody paste with the wave of a hand. Seriously, she was unfairly good at Force stuff, he'd been sent to the Temple_ years _before her and he couldn't keep up. "How did you even do that thing with the fog?"_

" _It's a tutaminis trick. Well, not really tutaminis, but it's a similar idea. Sort of doing it backwards, if that makes sense."_

" _No, that makes no sense at all."_

" _I don't know. Improve your tutaminis a bit and I might be able to teach you."_

 _Alek just smiled. Lesami was hardly a Jedi Master, but she tended to skip the more esoteric theory and philosophy too many of their teachers lingered on and get right to the point. If she was offering, he'd take it._

 _A few minutes later, they were wandering through the Room of a Thousand Fountains, around columns and lumps of granite and pools and streams, under leaves and needles and falls, heading for the exit toward the center of the ziggurat. They were maybe twenty meters from the door out when a voice calling Lesami's name broke over the sounds of crashing water and rustling leaves. A Devaronian Master, Alek was blanking on his name, was walking toward them, clawed fingers fidgeting. "I've been looking for you, Apprentice."_

 _Lesami glanced at Alek before turning back to the Master with a shrug. "I'm sorry, Master Tarkase, but I thought we had the rest of the day free."_

" _Oh, you didn't miss anything. You are needed for a meeting with someone from outside the Temple, is all." There were a couple slight hesitations in the second sentence, Tarkase, which was apparently his name, nearly stumbling over his words._

" _Oh, um, if you say so," she said, confused. Really, what would someone from outside the Temple be wanting to talk to an apprentice about? "I'll just drop by the clinic quick, if that's okay."_

 _Tarkase sighed, eyes tipping upward for an instant. "Unfortunately, there's no time for that."_

" _Master, Alek and I were sparring for an hour, at least. I've got burns everywhere." She held up a hand, pointing at the blotch of reddened skin on her arm. "Can't they wait a half hour for me to get treated and cleaned up quick?"_

 _The Master hesitated for a moment, fingers twitching some more. Which was just damn weird, Alek couldn't remember the last time he'd seen an adult Jedi look so uncomfortable. "Lady kun si Revas is quite impatient. I'm afraid any further delay will only complicate the situation further."_

 _From this angle Alek couldn't see her face, but he did notice Lesami's shoulders stiffen, her hands tighten into fists at her sides. Her voice hard, meticulously controlled, she said, "What is my mother doing here?"_

 _Alek frowned. Her mother? The Order made every effort to isolate initiates from the lives they'd had before being brought to the Temple, their families especially. It was a new policy, instituted after the war, and yet extremely controversial, but they stuck to it firmly enough he'd never heard of a parent being allowed to visit the Temple._

 _Tarkase looked even more uncomfortable then he'd been a second ago, fingers fidgeting all the harder as he drew a sharp breath between jagged teeth. "House Reva has been...difficult, lately. They've been demanding they be allowed to visit occasionally, even for you to stay with them on Shawken for a month out of the year. If their demands aren't met, they've threatened to take the Order to court over custody."_

" _What? Why haven't I heard of this until now?"_

" _The Council hoped it wouldn't go this far. House Reva refuses to be placated."_

 _Lesami let out a long, harsh sigh. "Of course they do. Take me to her, then."_

 _His face falling into a subtle frown, Tarkase said, "Mind yourself, Apprentice. Remember, there is no emoti—"_

"— _there is peace, I know. Let's go."_

 _Tarkase held a stern, disapproving look on her for a moment, but finally turned, starting off for the same door they'd been making for earlier. Alek watched the two of them walk away, Lesami's footsteps awkward and jerking, then jumped at the sudden pull at his wrist. Lesami glanced at him over her shoulder, just for a second, then turned away again, following at Tarkase's heel._

 _Okay. Apparently Alek was to come with. All right, then._

 _Even after living here for, oh, over six years now, it still got to him sometimes just how huge the Temple Complex was. Even just the Ziggurat above "ground" level, which was actually over a kilometer above the natural surface, was enormous by itself. With a base of a square kilometer, a height about four-thirds that, the place was an endless maze of huge corridors and tiny hallways, gardens and libraries, rooms for classes and larger ones for more physical training, apartments and common rooms by the dozens (though not enough for the whole Order, most of those were beneath the "surface"), and more and more and more. He'd gotten lost more times than he could count. It didn't help that the floors were skewed — chambers toward the middle had higher ceilings. One particularly odd case he knew of involved rooms directly across a corridor from each other that were labeled G-17046 and E-35947. One side of the corridor was on the seventeenth floor, and the other side the thirty-fifth. It was insane._

 _The walk the Jedi Master led them on took some minutes, down a dozen floors, down this corridor, then that one, stitching back and forth seemingly at random. Alek had the feeling they were getting pretty close to "ground" level, not far from the Entrance Hall...maybe. It could be really hard to tell._

 _Eventually, they were led between two huge double doors, the ancient wood carved with the visages of Jedi long dead dwarfing all three of them. Inside was a high-ceilinged room of granite, silver, and polished reddish wood, all of it set to a soft glow by sunlight slanting through tall windows to the west. Waiting on the thickly cushioned chairs and couches arrayed throughout the room were a slew of people. Some of them were Jedi, Masters all — Alek was a little surprised to see Grandmaster Sunrider, red hair lined with a little more grey than he remembered. Some were Republic officials, a human woman Alek recognized as the Senator from Shawken, along with a couple people from the Diplomatic Corps. Then there were several people Alek didn't recognize at all, most of them wearing fine clothes of shimmersilk and jewelry in gold and blue. He could only assume these were all related to Lesami._

 _Which was a bit of a surprise, really. Despite being sent to the Jedi rather late, when she'd been nine, Lesami had never mentioned her family at all. Honestly, Alek had been relieved — that topic would be a little awkward for him, considering his last memory of his family involved them all being murdered. Yeah, he'd rather not go there. But the people who came to the Temple later usually, well, missed their family, they all tended to talk about them, at least a little. He was starting to think maybe he should have asked her about that before._

 _Whatever he might have expected her family to be like, he certainly hadn't expected people so...important-looking, with pull enough to force Jedi and Republic to let them in the Temple to see her, with the Grandmaster and their Senator right there with them. It was... Well, it was just a little weird, was all._

 _Without stalling a beat, Lesami marched right toward the middle of the group, where the Grandmaster, the Senator, and her mother were waiting, moving quickly enough Alek had to scramble after her. He caught up in time to watch her stiff bows, hear the formal greetings passing her lips. The Grandmaster first, then the Senator,_ then _her mother. Alek failed to hold back a wince when she called her mother, "my lady," her shoulders tense, her voice brittle. The woman — long-faced and black-haired, wearing an overly-elaborate dress in green and blue stitched with gold — flinched as though struck._

 _Yeah, there was no way this was ending well._

 _Apparently he wasn't the only one to notice. Before anyone else could figure out what to say, Lesami's mother just staring at her with her mouth half-open, Grandmaster Sunrider cleared her throat, every eye in the room flicking to her. "I think we should let the Lady kun si Revas and Apprentice Lesami have some privacy, hmm?"_

" _That's not necessary, Master."_

" _Oh, I think it is." The Grandmaster gave Lesami an odd, weak smile. She took a step closer, a hand coming to gently rest on Lesami's shoulder. "Some things aren't meant to be aired out in public." Her hand moved again, a knuckle tipping Lesami's chin up an inch, meeting her eyes. Alek felt something pass through them, something in the Force he couldn't read from the outside. A pained expression flickered across the Grandmaster's face, just for a moment, before it was wiped away with an empty smile. She straightened again, nodded to Lesami's mother, then led the rest of the intimidating group out into the hall. A few of the fancy-looking people Alek had pegged as more of Lesami's relatives hesitated for a moment before following along, leaving Lesami and her mother alone in the oversized room._

 _Well, them and Alek. He'd started turning to follow the Grandmaster out with them, but he'd been stopped by another tug at his wrist. Apparently he was staying for this too._

 _For long seconds, Lesami and her mother just stared at each other. As the silence stretched on and on, Alek shuffled his feet a little, avoiding looking at her mother's face. This was just...unspeakably awkward. It was something on the air, something hot and tense and...and wounded, it was unbearable._

 _The woman broke first. A hesitant but still warm smile pulling at her lips, she said, "You look well, Sami."_

 _Lesami hardly reacted at all. She didn't move a muscle, still standing there so stiffly and brittley as though made of glass. Alek couldn't see her face from here, but he did catch a whiff through the Force, the air about her cold and hard and unbending._

 _Her smile faltered, twitching back and forth before vanishing completely. She shot a couple uncomfortable glances at Alek, before seemingly deciding to pretend he wasn't there. It took two attempts for her to find her voice again, her mouth opening once only to close again. "You haven't been taking any of our calls or answering our letters."_

 _Alek blinked — he'd had no idea Lesami's family had been trying to contact her, she'd never mentioned it. But she must have known about it, the tension ratcheted up another notch, her shoulders ticking up an inch. "No, I haven't."_

" _We've been worried, Sami."_

" _Is that so."_

 _The woman flinched again. She started to reach for Lesami, then seemed to think better of it, her hands falling awkwardly to her sides. "We feared... Well, the life of a Jedi can be...unsafe."_

 _Alek almost had to laugh. Over just the last couple decades, near on a third of the Order had either died or gone missing. "Unsafe" was one way to put it._

 _Her arms coming up to cross over her chest, Lesami let out a harsh scoff. "Maybe you should have thought of that before sending me here."_

" _Sami, we had no—"_

" _You_ did _have a choice!" Lesami's voice had gone low, a hiss that seemed to linger longer than it should. The air around her shimmered, the stone against Alek's feet throbbing,_ lub-dub lub-dub _, the familiar, sickening taste of blood and ash on his tongue. Lesami slumped slightly, then took a long, slow breath, in then out. In an instant, the throbbing ended, the chill vanished, the taint of Darkness on the air gone._

 _It was so quick Alek could almost convince himself Lesami hadn't just nearly gotten_ too _angry._

" _Was there something you wanted of me, my lady?"_

 _Of course, Lesami's mother, Force-blind as she was, had no idea just how thin of a line she was walking right now. She was saying something about her family missing her and such, but Alek was paying rather more attention to what she was_ doing _. She was taking another step forward, her hands coming up again, going around—_

 _Lesami took a sharp step backward, her mother's fingers coming to an abrupt stop a short distance away, as though striking an invisible wall. "I can't. I'm a Jedi now. My place is here."_

" _Your place is with your family!"_

" _Not anymore. You and your husband saw to that." The woman flinched again, and Alek saw the beginning of tears spark in her eyes. "Excuse me, my lady, but I have nothing more to say to you. I wish you a safe journey home." And Lesami spun on her heel, strode off toward the door without another word._

 _Alek jumped, muttered an awkward goodbye to her shaken mother before scrambling after her. By the time he made it out to the corridor, the Masters and the Republic officials and the Shawkenese were already descending into a loud argument, and he had to squeeze through the throng, forcing himself the same direction he knew without thinking Lesami had gone. When he was finally out in the open, it was just in time to see the hem of Lesami's overrobe whip around a corner. He broke into a run after her, around one corner, then another, far enough into the Temple the halls grew narrower, emptier, until his footsteps echoed around him in the stillness._

 _He abruptly froze in mid-step, sudden enough he nearly toppled over. He followed the twinge in his senses back to the door he'd just passed. Inside was a classroom, by the screens in the desks and the rounded holoprojector at the front one focused on astrogation, by the thin layer of dust on everything one currently not in use. And there was Lesami, standing in front of one of the tall flat-screens many of the internal rooms had in place of windows. At the moment, it was displaying a feed from one of the cameras on the outside of the Temple, but Lesami was flipping through the menu, searching for something else._

 _Even as he came up behind her, each step slow and uncertain, the endless cityscape of Coruscant was replaced with a beach. The sands were a brilliant gold in the alien sunlight, bits of quartz sparkling white and pink, the water a healthy blue-green, stretching off into the distance. The water was dotted with boats of all size and shapes, the beach thick with people, mostly humans, swimming and playing and sunbathing. At a second's glance he noticed many of them were going about completely nude, and he glanced away, cursing the warmth on his cheeks. It still took him aback sometimes, how...immodest certain peoples in the core could be._

 _Lesami closed the menu out, sank to sitting on the floor just in front of the flatscreen. And she stared up at the artificial view of some beach on another world, still and silent, her face almost eerily expressionless. Alek hesitated a moment, glancing at the door behind them, before sitting next to her. He hugged his knees to his chest, mostly just so he had something to do with his hands._

 _The silence stretched on for several, awkward moments. He had absolutely no idea what to say._

 _But he should at least try. This whole thing with her family and all was just...uncomfortable. Understatement, that. He didn't want to jump straight in, though, might as well ask. "Where is this?"_

" _Mathilnai, on Shawken." The harshness, the brittleness had gone out of her voice, leaving her sounding tired. "It's part of the protected lands in the east, it's not built up like the rest of the planet. There's a little town, just south of here, we used to stay there for a couple weeks every summer."_

" _Ah." And he had absolutely no idea what to say again already. Just, dammit. "Did you, uh, want to talk about it?"_

" _There's nothing to talk about. They gave me up. They'll have to learn to accept what that means, sooner or later. It's not my problem they're having difficulties with that."_

 _That wasn't at all what Alek meant. He groped for words for a moment, then winced even as they left his mouth. This wasn't the right thing to say, he knew it. "You know, they really had no choice."_

" _They_ had a choice _." Lesami turned to glare at him, but he didn't buy it for a second. He was sitting too close to miss the slight wetness to her eyes. "Other people might not, but_ they did _. I'm po si Revas, Alek, if my family wanted to they could—" Lesami broke off with a sigh, her eyes falling closed. "They_ chose _to give me away, and I refuse to forget it."_

 _Alek knew what he should say. He should say something about the anger she was feeling. She was trying to hide it, he could tell, but her control wasn't quite that good, it leaked out into the Force, she might as well be screaming it for everyone to hear. He should say something about that, should say that holding onto this anger toward her birth family, holding onto this pain of betrayal, that it wasn't the Jedi way. That she had to let it go, she had to forgive them. If she didn't, she was risking..._

 _Well, there_ wasn't _a choice really, when it came down to it._

 _But he couldn't. Not when it was so, so raw, so... He knew she would hate it, if he tried to give her the party line, that she would be angry at him. He'd prefer Lesami not be angry at him. He preferred it rather a lot._

 _And he did understand. He remembered the Mandalorians coming to his village. The noise of blasterfire, the screaming, the fire and the blood. People dying, people he'd known all his life, all of his family, his dad cut down in front of him, his mom screaming, his brothers and sisters and cousins falling one by one as they fled. He still had nightmares about it, sometimes. The Mandalorians had taken his family from him, and he would never forget it, he couldn't._

 _It wasn't quite the same thing. Lesami's family was still alive, but they'd been taken from her all the same. Only, they hadn't been taken from her by force. No, it was_ her family themselves _who had done it to her, had cut her away from all she'd known. It wasn't quite the same thing, but it was close enough._

 _In a way, Alek thought it might be even worse. The Mandalorians had been nothing to him, his family hadn't a choice in the matter. And he had been young, four or five, it was hard to even remember them sometimes. Lesami had been older. And it hadn't been by force, her family had_ chosen _to betray her._

 _He should say all those Jedi things about letting go of the Darkness inside herself, but he couldn't. He just couldn't._

 _Instead he slid a little closer and — slowly, hesitantly — draped an arm around her shoulders, down her side. Lesami let out a thin sigh, leaned into him, tucked herself in under his arm. "If you ever do want to talk about it, or, anything else, I'll be here."_

" _I know."_

 _They sat in silence, Lesami watching the feed from her homeworld, Alek...well, trying not to get distracted. Lesami could be distracting sometimes lately. He did manage to not think about wherever his hand happened to be at the moment, he wasn't thinking about it, but her head being against his shoulder made it impossible to not notice the smell of her hair. He meant, it was_ right there _, that really wasn't his fault._

 _In a low whisper, Lesami said, "I know what you're thinking, by the way."_

 _Alek jumped, went straight to cursing himself in his head._ Of course _she did, she was far better at this Force stuff than he was, he wasn't sure he'd even notice her in his head. Well, maybe he_ hadn't _noticed her in his head, but things could leak out sometimes, she probably didn't need to actively look. She sounded more amused than anything, though, so Alek shook off his embarrassment, glared down at the top of her head. "Well, yeah. You are a cheater."_

" _Mm-hmm." He couldn't see from this angle, but he still knew she was smiling. "If, a couple years from now, you still want to talk about that, I'll be here."_

 _Oh, uh, right, okay. Perfectly reasonable. They were young, after all, he fifteen and she thirteen. Waiting a couple years to even talk about it was perfectly reasonable._

 _At least, it_ would _be perfectly reasonable if they weren't Jedi. That...complicated matters. They should probably...well, not._

 _All the same, he breathed in through her hair again, this time not even bothering to try to hide that he was smelling her._

 _He couldn't see from this angle, but he still knew she was smirking._

* * *

Cianen looked out over the nearly empty briefing room from the balcony, her hands so tight on the guardrail her knuckles had gone white.

The projection of their little fleet arrayed in space had gone out when they'd entered hyperspace, reverting to...she didn't know the proper name, diagrams of each ship with what looked like real-time status updates, whatever. Seeing it all made Cianen feel even more nervous than she'd been a second ago, biting her lip and tapping a foot against the floor. They were too few, somehow she knew they were too few.

She had a bad feeling, a very bad feeling. This whole thing was going to go all wrong.

The wait was interminable, despite the brevity of the jump they were making, Cianen almost agonizingly tense, the rumble of the hyperdrive deafening. The stillness of her Jedi minder next to her, the handful of crew members poking around down by the projector, was only making her feel worse, the eye of a storm inverted, rational panic surrounded by delusional calm. She'd mostly worked out her frustration arguing in the pilot's lounge and with Asyr, but she still had to bite her lip to keep herself from cursing.

If there was one thing she had trouble tolerating, it was idiocy. That this particular episode happened to be threatening her life wasn't making it any easier.

After what felt like hours, but could be only minutes, the smooth groaning of the hyperdrive ceased, the sublights kicking in an instant later with a thunk and a roar. Red lights along the ceiling came on, but alarms didn't blare — everyone had known they were going straight into combat, there was no reason to announce it. The projection blanked out, over the next seconds a hologram depicting the skies over Taris replaced it. Details were sparse, just an indistinct convex curve to represent the planet, the Sith fleet one pincer shape and two blocky prisms, all in red, the Republic fleet much the same, simple shapes more numerous but smaller, cast in greens and blues.

The coms burst into life, the chatter thin and tinny from up here, a dozen voices all at once scrambling enough Cianen only picked out a few words here or there. The green and blue shapes were moving, descending on the red ones, a net falling to trap them against the planet's atmosphere. Even as they moved, they disgorged a cloud of tiny colored specks, starfighters by the dozens. A few lingered with the larger shapes, but the majority darted out toward the Sith, squadrons mixed into a mass of light so thick it was almost a solid line, narrowing the distance so fast, too fast.

It was impossible to tell which, but she knew one of those tiny little dots was Asyr. She was trying to not think about that.

Watching the display, she felt her shoulders hunch, an odd tingling at the small of her back. Something wasn't... The vanguard of the Republic capital ships were just sinking into range, the first lines of simulated turbolaser fire already lancing out, pale white curves symbolizing energy shields fading into life around the larger Sith ships. But they didn't fire back. They didn't even fire at the cloud of approaching fighters, less than a kilometer out their windows now. They weren't shooting back. They just floated there, waiting.

Cianen realized what was happening seconds before the trap was sprung.

In an inexorable wave, a flood of tiny red dots washed out from behind the Sith cruisers. Even as they appeared, the capital ships fired into the densest parts of the swarm of Republic fighters, tight lines cutting through the ranks, blue and green dots vanishing by the handful. An instant later, the red dots fell upon them, coming from ahead, above and below and left and right. The first volley blotted out even more of the Republic ships, only a few Sith fighters taken by return fire, before the formations slipped into each other, the writhing mass of quick-moving dots too confused to make out what was going on.

A few seconds later, a grey haze appeared on the opposite side of the Republic fleet. The haze quickly resolved into ships, just decanted from hyperspace, a huge fleet, dozens of them. A fleet burning enemy red, positioned in a thin hemisphere around the Republic ships, pinning them against the planet.

And they came out firing.

Hundreds of thin lines of turbolaser fire, dozens of sparks of rockets, cut into the Republic fleet, each ship taking fire from somewhere, some from multiple sides. The floor jerked under Cianen's feet as the _Spire_ took fire from two directions at once, an elbow slamming painfully against the guardrail. The lights overhead flickered just a little, the ship's systems redirecting power toward the shields, but the hologram remained firm.

So Cianen could see the first few green and blue lights already going out.

She turned to the Jedi next to her, screaming over the chaos on the coms, raised voices all around, the groaning and clattering of the ship around them. "See what I mean?! _Trap!"_

The Jedi didn't say anything to that, just looked at her, her eyes heavy and tired. The floor bucked again, nearly taking Cianen to her knees, but the Jedi didn't even flinch, standing steady as steel. "I have to go to Bastila."

Before she could go on a rant about these idiots dragging her into a battle she'd _told_ them was a _terrible_ idea, and this bitch just calmly standing there like nothing was happening, like people weren't dying by the hundreds because they _wouldn't listen_ , they were interrupted with a shout of Cianen's name. Just as the man ran into the room the ship shuddered again, sending him pitching to the ground right at Cianen's feet, cursing and clutching his shoulder.

It took Cianen only a second to recognize him. "Ulgo? Now's a bad time, don't you think?"

Ulgo managed to get to his feet, still shaky, teetering a bit side to side. Not that Cianen could blame him — the shuddering of the floor was constant now, in time with a rattling somewhere deep in the ship that did _not_ sound good. "I've been ordered to get you off the ship before they start boarding." He stumbled forward, wrapping an arm around hers and pulling her away from the guardrail.

Letting herself be dragged, feet spread wide against the heaving floor, Cianen almost wanted to scoff. Giving up on the battle already, were they? But a glance over her shoulder silenced her — half of the fleet was gone already, the remaining Republic ships lost in a sea of red. Fuck, that hadn't taken very long.

She also noticed the Jedi had disappeared, because of course she had.

Anyway, yes, escaping. Pay attention, Hayal, spending too much time critiquing these idiots' decision making will only get you killed. Staggering out into the hallway, the sharp right angles of the internal halls were shaking so badly they almost seemed curved. Over the rattling of the ship, the shouting of crewmen coming from somewhere down the hall, Cianen yelled, "Boarding? Won't they just blow us up?"

She felt Ulgo's head shake more than she saw it — she was busy watching each placement of her feet. "They'll want Jedi Shan alive."

Oh. Well, yes, of course they would. That should give them some time to get to the escape pods at least.

For a moment, Cianen almost wished Shan would be captured. The bloody infuriating idiot had dragged Cianen here, despite her protests, and by the look of it just might get her killed. It would suit her right. But no, no it wouldn't. Cianen had heard horror stories of how the Sith under Malak treated their prisoners. No one deserved that.

Even if she was a self-righteous little cunt.

* * *

Tutaminis — _The proper in-universe name of the ability called "Force absorb" in a few video games. Essentially, absorbing energy of all kinds and converting it into something else. What Lesami did (applying enough energy to the nearby water to evaporate a bit off the surface) would be in the same class of energy-manipulating abilities, but I don't know if there's actually a separate name for it. Tutaminis will be showing up a lot in my fics, it's very exploitable._

 _[It was a new policy] — Many people tend to forget just how much the Jedi Order changed throughout history. At the time of the Great Sith War (3996 BBY), while Jedi were expected to live comparatively ascetic and selfless lives, they were allowed personal relationships. Jedi were often recruited as adults, had families and children. By the time of KotOR (3956 BBY), only forty years later, we see a far more dogmatic and restrictive Jedi Order reminiscent of the one depicted in the prequel movies. In my head, under pressure of certain conservative voices that had always existed, the Order officially adopted these policies designed to isolate Jedi from outside loyalties at the Conclave on Exis Station (3986 BBY). But this was a_ _ **very**_ _recent development, and the new policies haven't yet been fully implemented. The Jedi Council certainly look very poorly on people flouting the new rules, and the youngest generations of Jedi are more effectively indoctrinated, but there are still plenty of Jedi who object to the new order around._

The Temple Precinct — _Canonically, the location of the modern Jedi Temple was only donated to the Order around the end of the Great Hyperspace War (c. 5000 BBY). I'm not sure this is realistic, for various historical and political reasons. In my head, the Temple grounds were ceded to the Jedi during the reconstruction after the Pius Dea civil war (which, also in my head, was partially an effort by the Alsakani, who were in charge in the immediate aftermath, to neuter the religious cult by depriving them of the holiest site in their faith), which would have been around 10,960 BBY. The Temple Complex is thus much older than is suggested in canon, having had more than enough time to grow to the absolutely ridiculous scale of the prequel movies. Not the_ _ **same**_ _Temple, of course, since it'll be destroyed more than once over those few millennia, but of similar size. Which is absurd, seriously, the place is fucking enormous._

 _By the way, anyone who enjoys nerdy things and hasn't informed themselves on the topic should go to the Star Wars wiki and read up on the Alsakan Conflicts and the Pius Dea era. Fascinating shit._

Grandmaster Sunrider — _Nomi Sunrider, one of the main characters of the_ Tales of the Jedi _comic series, and the Grandmaster of the Jedi Order immediately following the Great Sith War. Tionne of Luke's Jedi is fond of legends involving her, and Meetra Surik was (partially) trained by her daughter Vima, but her appearances otherwise have been limited for copyright reasons. (Actually, fun fact, Vima was intended to be a companion in KotOR, "Bastila" was originally Juhani's name.) Judging by her age, she should still be Grandmaster of the Order during the Mandalorian Wars._

* * *

 _Yes, I still exist._

 _I recently lost my job for medical reasons, so I've had more time to write lately. I've been too scatterbrained to focus on any particular one, but I thought I'd share what I do have for my poor, neglected readers. A few other fics were posted at the same time as this one. All of them will be updated randomly, as I finish chapters._

 _This fic specifically, I **just** wrote that last scene today. It is a bit awkward, and cuts off very weird, but the latter is on purpose, meh meh. (Also, holy shit, those notes at the end, what is wrong with me.) The next chapter will be the entirety of the _Endar Spire _sequence, plus a little extra. So, might be a little while, we'll see._

 _~Wings_


	4. Endar Spire — II

She woke up, and immediately regretted it.

But she knew she couldn't go back to sleep. She had woken somewhere that was definitely not a bed, metal cold and unyielding. There was more than a hint of smoke on the air, each breath coming thick with charred plastics and melted flesh, enough she felt she might vomit, stomach clenching with every twitch, her throat tight and hot.

Or, maybe that was the concussion, come to think of it. At least, she thought this was a concussion. She'd never had one before, but she was feeling pretty certain. Even the slightest movement set something between her eyes to stabbing, her stomach to roiling, her head felt heavy, like someone had set off a fire extinguisher inside her skull, the foam leaking out one of her ears. The sirens weren't helping, her teeth vibrating with each beat of the klaxon, she felt her eyes might fall out of her head.

She couldn't go back to sleep. Well, she wasn't certain she'd _been_ asleep, it seemed more likely she'd passed out after being hit in the head. That she didn't remember being hit in the head pointed to concussion, yes, she was pretty sure that was a thing. Considering the last thing she _did_ remember was the ship she'd been on being fired on by a Sith fleet, getting up seemed the proper thing to do.

She should do that. Yes.

The world swirling around her even with her eyes closed, she turned onto her knees. She sat back on her heels, nearly tipping over backward as her head went all fuzzy, the floor shifting under her. She cautiously cracked her eyes open, but while everything was a mass of colored blurs, at least it wasn't too bright. That stinging spot between her eyes only got worse when she was trying to look at things, but she kind of needed to see to walk. As she sat there, shakily breathing, ignoring as best she could how dizzy and weak and awful she felt, she squinted at her surroundings, trying to pick something out of the chunky soup of grey and silver and black and red.

She was in one of the interior hallways of the _Spire_ , she decided — those _looked_ like right angles between walls and ceiling, everything made of the familiar grey metal broken with spots of bronze, yes. Around her was a sea of Republic red and gold and black, fuzzy figures splayed out across the deck, in one place huddled together in a corner.

No, not huddled. Piled. Eventually, her vision slowly clearing with each second she sat there blinking, she picked out more details. Patches of a different, wetter sort of red. Limbs that bent the wrong way, heads set at awkward angles. In the corner, bodies twisted into each other, tangled and broken. They were all dead, or at the least injured and unconscious.

A thought surfaced from the dizzy, numb blankness that passed for her brain. Power surge. The ship's system had gone out, perhaps just for the blink of an eye. Including the artificial gravity. They'd all been thrown against the wall, slamming into it at who even knew what speed, under what force.

She'd come away with a concussion. It looked like she'd been lucky.

Her wandering gaze found a face a short distance in front of her, at the edge of the pile of corpses, eyes still and open, one colored an unbroken red. It took her a few seconds to recognize Ulgo. And he was supposed to be getting her to an escape pod.

 _Rude_.

She broke into high, breathless giggles, her head only going heavier and emptier as she struggled to breathe. By the time her chest finally stopped heaving, the corridor stopped swirling, she was lying on her back, sweaty and sick and dizzy, she thought she might pass out again.

No, bad. Get up. She turned over, struggled to get at least one of her feet under her. She stood on shaky knees, but the hallway pitched around her, she crashed to the floor again, her already bruised hip screaming at her. Okay. Ow. She glanced toward the pile of dead Republic men and women. Forcing herself to her hands and knees, she dragged herself across the ground in fits and starts, each breath a sickening fire in her lungs, each beat of her heart setting her head to swimming.

She made it to Ulgo. And cursed to herself — he was dressed as a navy officer, he wouldn't have anything useful on him. She slipped the blaster out from his belt though, wedged it into the waist of her pants at the small of her back, dug the security chit out of his glove, put that deep in her pocket. And she crawled over him, making for the nearest figure wearing proper armor. Luckily, he just so happened to be laid out at an angle she could get at his back. It took her a moment to find the catch in his armor, popped it open.

A first aid kit plopped to the floor at her knees.

She rifled through the contents, sorting through the handful of hypos. Her vision wasn't clear enough to make out the text, but these things were color-coded for a reason. She grabbed a deep blue one, popped the cap with a thumb, and jabbed it into her arm. She didn't feel the injection itself, too numb for that, but the neurostim hit her like a ton of bricks. Her headache immediately got about twenty times worse, white fire radiating down the sides of her neck. She bowed down to her knees, her fingers clutching her head, clenching her teeth to keep herself from screaming.

It faded in a few moments, still hot and tight but at least manageable. When she opened her eyes again, her vision was much clearer, the hallway around her, striped with pale shadows cast by the pinkish emergency lights, now made of sharp lines and corners, the spinning... _mostly_ gone. Mostly would have to do for now, popping two of those right in a row was a bad, _bad_ idea. Her fingers noticeably more steady than they'd been a moment ago, she closed the pack again, then played out the strap, throwing it over her head and tightening it around her waist. Shuffling over to another nameless corpse, she grabbed a second one, just in case. She gathered a few extra power cells from nearby bodies, slipping them into her pockets, her waistband, tucked away a couple spare gas cartridges while she was at it. Only needed to replace the cartridge every few hundred shots, but, well. She took a second security chit from a body with a sergeant's insignia on his chest, might or might not open more doors than Ulgo's, but, well. She took his com too, clipping it to her waist after a bit of fumbling.

Just in case.

Unfortunately, none of these poor bastards had a blaster rifle. She was a better shot with a pistol, of course, but in tight quarters like this the greater rate of fire and higher powered shots could still be an advantage.

Cianen frowned, tipped back to sit on her ankles again. She pulled the pistol she'd swiped out from her back, held it in her lap. She turned it around, confirming it had a full charge, snapped the chamber open to check the cartridge quick — the inside of the glass cylinder was clear, pristine. She clicked it back closed, flipped the safety off, the electronics whirring to life in her hand. And she stared down at the thing, blinking in astonishment.

How the fuck did she know how to do that? She'd never held a blaster in her life.

She shook her head, casting away the odd thought — which was a bad idea, the corridor went spinning around her again, she had to wait a moment for it to stop. Once reality was done going crazy for a minute, she pulled another pistol from a soldier's belt, confirmed the safety was on with a glance, tucking it away at her back. All right. That should do.

It was a close thing, her numb knees almost refusing to support her weight, but she made it to her feet this time. With one hand against the bulkhead, she stumbled forward, each step she took more steady than the last, the swirling at the edges of her vision slowly fading.

The blaring of the klaxons was still pounding in her head, though. Because the Sith _had_ to leave that thing working. They were evil like that.

Eventually she made it to the door, a slab of heavy durasteel blocking off the whole hallway. She tucked herself against the wall, blaster held halfway up and ready, and tapped at the panel.

And nothing happened.

Glaring at the thing, she started reaching toward her pocket for Ulgo's security chit. And she froze halfway there, staring at the panel. It had gone dark. The power was cut.

Shit.

A voice suddenly cracked across the air, she whirled around on her heel. Which sent the hallway spinning again, she teetered against the door, glaring at the wall. Because, of course, she'd had her back it, there couldn't have been anyone behind—

"Professor? Can you hear me?"

Cianen jumped, her hand snapping to her waist. Right, the com she'd taken. Ha. She fumbled with the thing, eventually finding the VOX switch, flipping it on. "You just about gave me a heart attack, Onasi."

"Yeah, saw that. Sorry." She blinked, glanced around. There wasn't anyone she could— "You and Jedi Annas are the last two on board still alive. Think you can make it to the escape pods?"

Oh, she got it. He must have been searching for survivors through the camera feeds. "Ah, I'm a bit shaky, but I can walk." Sort of. "Aren't the escape pods this way, though?" she asked, slapping the sealed door with her open hand.

"The quickest way, yes. But you can't go this way, there's a hull breach between here and there. You'll have to go around. I can give you directions, but you'll have to go fast. The Sith are scouring the ship looking for Bastila, and I don't know how long I can hold them off."

"Right." She pushed off the door with a hip, staggered a few steps before finding her balance again. She still had to walk with a hand to the wall, but at least she was moving. Her stomach turning rather more easily now that she was trying to walk, she picked over the corpses strewn about the hall, giving the pile in the corner as wide a berth as she could. Cianen almost couldn't believe she'd been picking over them for supplies just a couple minutes ago. It already didn't feel quite real, like something out of a dream. "I hope it's a short walk."

"I hope you know how to use that blaster."

"We're about to find out."

"...What?"

"Never mind." Cianen limped around the corner, the next hall empty, looking somehow artificial in the strobing of the emergency lights, a slightly less-than-realistic computer simulation. At least there weren't any more corpses around here, or even anything at all, the hall completely empty. Everything must have been shaken out during whatever had killed all those men back there. "Let's rely on my theoretical ability to shoot people as little as possible, shall we."

"Jedi Annas is picking them off, but there will still be a few." Onasi's voice came quieter than it'd been a moment ago, a whisper low enough she almost didn't hear it over the klaxon.

She frowned. Then she glanced ahead, only a few meters away. This hallway opened up into the external corridor, the walls curved, bowing outward. She paused a moment, fumbled at her belt for the com. She flicked off the speaker, unfolded the earpiece, wedged it in place. A quick check the blaster was readied, and she nodded, pointed ahead.

There was an odd note on Onasi's voice, now coming from right against the left side of her head, but he didn't say anything about whatever it was he was thinking. "You'll be going to the right. Around the bend ahead are two Sith troopers, blaster rifles and full armor."

"No way around?"

"I'm sorry, no."

She winced, but started forward all the same, leaning one hip against the wall. Once she was around the corner, the rounded walls of the external corridor meant she couldn't lean against it anymore. She made her awkward, shuffling steps as quiet as she could, which mostly meant going very slow. Her head ached, her spine tingled, her left hip and ankle throbbed, but she kept limping along, blaster pointed unwaveringly at the bend in the corridor ahead. Approaching within a couple meters, she sank to a crouch. Then drew in a sharp breath as her ankle protested, the hot stabbing nearly taking her to her knees. She clenched her teeth, slowly creeped, step by step, toward the waiting soldiers.

It felt rather surreal. Was she really about to kill two people? Cianen had hardly ever even gotten in a fight before. It felt like something out of a dream, a horrible dream.

She stopped just out of sight, leaned her head out just far enough to spy the soldiers around the bend. Two tall, thick figures in the silver and black of the Sith military, covered head to foot in gleaming metal, the breastplate on one sporting a slash of char, a glancing hit. Both carried wicked-looking blaster rifles, as long as her arm. They were clearly talking about something — they faced each other, occasionally twisting with a half-made gesture — but the sound was contained by their helmets, the figures were almost eerily silent in the noise of the wounded ship.

Drawing a long breath through her nose, trying not to wince at how her head flared, she carefully lined up the end of her blaster with the faceplate of one of the soldiers, the one toward the opposite side of the hall, the better angle. With a little pistol like this, there was no way she could burn through that armor, but the visor was just hardened plastic, shouldn't be a problem.

Cianen had no idea where she'd learned all that.

Casting her confusion off, she let out a thin breath, and squeezed the trigger. There was a scream of superheated air, the blaster twitching in her hand, a flash of reddish light too quick to follow. Before she could blink, a glowing gash had been seared into the soldier's helmet, and he was toppling boneless to the ground.

The second started moving, but she was already scrambling backward. After only a few steps she slipped, falling hard on her arse, but she didn't bother trying to get up again. She sat on the floor, blaster pointed upward to the corner, her breath hot in her throat, the clanging of the second soldier's footsteps loud in her ears. The instant he came around the corner, before he could bring his rifle around, she squeezed off a single shot. With a second flash of light, a second squeal of protest, the second soldier was collapsing, dead before he hit the floor.

Cianen took a moment to breathe, her hands quivering, her chest and head throbbing with the pounding of her heart. But only a moment — she had to keep moving.

As she forced herself to her shaky feet, Onasi's voice again sprung to life in her ear. "Not bad, Professor." This time that odd tone on his voice was recognizable as suspicion, most intense on _professor_ , almost ironic. Which wasn't unreasonable, honestly. He was probably wondering how exactly a bloody xenolinguistics professor had learned to do all this.

Cianen didn't respond. She didn't have anything to respond with. She had no better idea than he did.

A few steps later, she came upon one of the fresh corpses, a thin trail of steam still rising from his helmet. She came to one knee, ignoring the twinge of pain from her ankle. She unhooked one side of the strap on the blaster rifle, gave it a good yank to get it out from under his shoulder, cradled the thing in her arms. Full charge, but a flick of the chamber showed the gas cartridge had gone just a little foggy. Hmm. She reached for the man's waist, unbuckling his belt after a few awkward seconds of fumbling. Thick, black synth bearing spare cells and cartridges down the entire length, was too long to fit around her waist, but she could sling it over a shoulder just fine. The rifle used different sized ammunition than her pistol, after all.

She limped around the bend in the corridor, picked her way over the thin carpet of slain navy officers toward the Sith soldier she'd killed. Most of the Republic people, all of them pocked with charred and bloody blaster wounds, weren't even armed. Seemed...excessive. She kneeled over the first person Cianen had ever killed (don't think about that), started working his rifle out from under him.

"Do you really have to do that?"

There was a twinge of queasiness on his voice, enough she frowned to herself in confusion. "Do what?"

"Loot the bodies."

She blinked. "I'm just taking the weapons." The chamber flicked open, and she saw the gas cartridge in this one was much clearer. She dropped the first one she'd picked up, settled the strap so the second would hang over her hip, comfortably in reach. "It's not like I'm turning out their pockets."

Onasi grumbled a little, but dropped it.

She pushed back to her feet, set off limping down the corridor. Her ankle and hip were getting worse the further she walked, stiffer with each step, throbbing in time with her heartbeat. But she kept going, leaning heavily against a hand on the bulkhead, stumbling now and again over the arms and legs of faceless corpses strewn across the floor, but she didn't fall, forced herself on shaking knees, on, and on, and on.

She imagined, with the rifle and the ammo belts slung over her shoulders, the medpacs and pistol stuck into her waistband, she probably looked like the hero out of a terrible action holo right about now. Cianen had to bite her lip to hold in the mad urge to break into giggles at the thought.

Okay, yeah, she might be just a little delirious. Some medical attention would be nice.

Around another bend in the corridor, she came upon a door. After confirming with Onasi the room beyond was empty, she dug a security chit out of her pocket, waved it over the panel. The door receded into the wall, and she limped into—

She froze, blinking around the room. Half of the emergency lights were out, a few panels throwing out sparks, the place cast in deep, flickering shadows. She made out computer terminals, a few chairs here and there, a large flatscreen, webbed with cracks, stretching all along one wall. "You're leading me toward the bridge."

"Everywhere else is blocked off. It's the only way through."

Gritting her teeth, she started making her way across the room, propping herself against terminals and chairs whenever one was convenient. If the Sith troops were going to be concentrated anywhere, it would be near the bridge. "Any on the other side of this one?"

"Ah, five, looks like."

She stopped, turning to rest half her weight on the corner of a control panel. "Five? You're kidding."

"Afraid not. Have any more tricks up your sleeve?"

"Let's hope so." She tipped fully onto her feet again, then staggered as her head went light and fluffy, her hearing gone fuzzy and the room spinning around her. A hand and a knee against the terminal kept her from falling, a few heavy breaths and her head slowly cleared, the swirling lessened. It didn't go away completely, but it'd have to do.

"Hayal? Are you okay?"

"No, I'm not. In fact, I've been having a _very_ bad day."

"It seems to be going around."

She grunted. A few moments of limping her way across the room had her coming to rest against the wall, just to the side of the door. There was absolutely no way she'd be able to take out five. With the rifle on full auto, she _might_ have gotten lucky, but that was far less likely with her head spinning. She doubted she'd be able to pull off the kind of marksmanship she had just a couple minutes ago. (Not that she had any idea how she'd done that in the first place.) Unless she came up with something clever, she was going to die.

Thankfully, she was _very_ clever.

It took only a couple seconds staring at the pistol in her hands to come to a decision. She did have two of the things. She popped open the chamber, slipped out the cartridge. Poking around the inside, she wrenched the limiter off the board, tore out a bit of the housing, then wedged the cartridge roughly in place, snapped it closed again. She slid out the power cell, whacked the end of it against a nearby terminal. Then again, again, the cap at the end slowly twisting off with each hit. She took the plastic between her teeth, ripped it off, revealing the metal of the high-density batteries inside. She shoved in the little bit of metal she'd taken from the cartridge housing, twisting it around a bit, until she was sure she'd made a bridge between the cells. Taking a steading breath, she slapped the whole pack back into the base of the pistol.

"Uh, Hayal? What are you doing?"

"Improvising." She dialed the power setting all the way up. A security chit held in one hand, her finger hovered over the safety. This was a _terrible_ idea. "Are they clumped up at all?"

"Yeah, they're all by the door, across the room. _Shit!_ Go! Come on, come on!"

"What's wrong?" A flick of her thumb had the safety off, the blaster whirring to life. And then whirring more and more, the sound rising to a piercing, electric whine. Before the thing could start burning her hand, she flipped it around, grasping it by the barrel. And she waited, watching the pistol as it started to steam, to spark. A little more. A little more...

"No, it's not me, I— They cornered Annas, she's trying to fight her way out. Come on, _come on_..."

She scoffed. As far as she was concerned, the more of them the Jedi killed the better. She'd rather her fight it out than sneak around. But she didn't have time to argue, not if she wanted to keep her hand. She swiped her security chit, the door sliding open.

Across the room, strewn with terminals and chairs and projectors but in much better shape, was a clump of figures. Four soldiers in gleaming armor, another in the synthweave of a naval officer, cast in the blacks and silvers of the Sith. She quickly took aim, then hurled the hissing blaster into the room. She didn't wait to watch it land, ducked back around the door, slammed it closed with the push of a button.

Less than two seconds later, there was a muffled _whoomph_ , the wall shuddered against her back. Ignoring Onasi cursing in her ear, she waited for three counts before opening the door again.

Where the soldiers had been was a ruin, armor and bodies thrown into a blender, reduced to a broken, bloody, smoking mess. The floor and ceiling and parts of the wall near them had been charred black, the closest terminals smashed to sparking pieces, the air quickly thickening with dark smoke.

"Ooh, shit..."

She limped across the room, trying to ignore the way it tilted and spun around her. The smoke only turned her blood thinner, her head so light she feared it might float away, but she kept plodding forward, one step then another. When she noticed one of the armored soldiers was still moving, she put a bolt from the rifle in his back without a blink.

"Remind me to not piss you off."

Through the pain and the dizziness, she felt her lips twitching into a smirk.

She stepped onto the bridge, paused a moment to look around. Not exactly an area of the ship Cianen had been allowed to poke around in. The room was long, narrowing to a point in front of her, where the metal of the hull fell away, the blue-grey curve of Taris slowly wandering across the transparisteel viewports as the _Spire_ drifted. To her left was a large greenish panel of glass, broken in the middle, shards scattered on the floor. To her right was a bank of terminals and such, some intact and some smashed and fitfully smoldering, forming a solid row splitting the bridge in half. To get to the door on the other side she'd have to walk all the way around, near to the stations for the command crew toward the front.

She could see from here some of the chairs at the front still had bodies in them. There were a couple more strewn across the bridge, but not very many, most of the crew must have gotten out. By the look of the hallways she'd been through, they probably hadn't gotten very far.

Before she could even start for the front of the bridge, the door on the opposite side of the terminals blew open, huge slabs of durasteel tumbling into the room with a crash that made her head flare white, she barely managed to stay standing. She heard the pounding of footsteps, ducked behind one of the terminals, peaked over the edge.

Scrambling backward onto the bridge, her lightsaber moving so quickly it almost seemed a solid blue energy shield before her, blaster bolts melting their way into walls and ceiling and sizzling electronics, was a Jedi. Cianen knew this one, she'd been hanging around when she'd been watching the battle break out on the holoprojector in the briefing room. Didn't know anything about her, wouldn't know her name was Annas if Onasi hadn't said so, but then, she'd avoided contact with the Jedi on the ship as much as possible. They just made her uncomfortable.

She was hardly alone in that. A lot of people didn't like Jedi.

A black-silver blur shot through the door, red striking blue in a shower of a sparks and a squealing noise that made her teeth ache. Slowed down for a second, the blur resolved into another Jedi, a bald-headed man in a mix of synthweave and plasteel, cast in Sith colors. And then they were moving, blue and red lightsabers slashing and spinning and clashing in a dance too quick for the eye to follow, the two figures darting back and forth, jumping over terminals, surrounded with the flashes of sparks and fire and lightning, debris from the smallest shard of glass to whole chairs flying through the air as though caught in a whirlwind, the noise of it incredible, squealing and crashing and hissing.

Yeah, there was nothing she could do about any of that.

Her eyes were drawn by a storm of clanging, heavy boots striking the floor in chorus. A group of Sith soldiers were streaming through the door. Two, three, five...eight, it looked like eight. They hadn't seen her, had their rifles pointed at the fighting Jedi. Waiting for an opportunity to shoot Annas in the back, most like.

There _was_ something she could do about that. She flicked her rifle into full auto, propped the end against the lip of the terminal, and opened up on the Sith. The ear-piercing scream of superheated air came as a constant agony, her hands consumed with a distracting tingle, blooms of red light and char stitched across silver armor. A few of the Sith were hit, twitching at each smoking hole scored through them before collapsing, but the rest dove away, ducking behind corners and terminals. She ducked before they could fire back, the first shots searing over her head after she was already down. It wasn't quite empty, but she popped out the power cell anyway, slipping a fresh one off the belt.

There was an odd thrum, like her heart beating hard felt everywhere at once, a tingle so intense it hurt running up her spine. Without thinking, she sprung upward, rolling over the bank of terminals, the bone-shivering hum of a lightsaber passing behind her, jabbed in the sides again and again with who knew what as she tumbled to the other side. She fell graceless to the floor on her back, gasping for breath.

One of the Sith soldiers was crouched behind the second terminal from her head, his rifle already turning for her. Firing straight up, she stitched a line of fire across him before he could get a shot off, then rolled over onto her knees, trying to ignore how the room spun with the motion, how the cacophony filling the bridge pounded at her skull. There were still several Sith about, blasters peeking out from behind partitions and terminals and control panels, and she was far too exposed. She swept over their positions with laserfire, not trying to hit them so much as discourage them from hitting her, the metal of the walls glowing a pale red from hit after hit. She managed to take out one of them, a lucky hit right across the top of his head, but she couldn't keep up fire this thick for long, the power cell would run out too quickly.

Just as the rifle beeped at her, five shots left, Annas came swirling back into sight, a tail of blue light trailing her. She jumped, rolled back over to the other side of the terminals, getting a few more stabs in the side from corners and switches and such, popped in a fresh power cell before peeking over again. Annas had fallen upon them with all the unstoppable force of a meteor, lightsaber tearing through metal and plastic as easily as flesh and bone. Most of them were already dead, dismembered corpses mixed with faintly glowing shards of whatever they'd been hiding behind, only a couple still fighting, wildly scrambling backward, firing aimlessly in the Jedi's general direction. She managed to put down one of them, her swirling vision sending half the burst into the wall next to him, Annas slashing through another, flying for the last so quickly she was a blur.

"You!" She jumped, turned around, a hip against the terminal steadying her as the room spun. The Sith was there, lightsaber loosely held down at his side. It was hard to tell, with how unsteady her vision was at the moment, but his eyes did look rather wider than they should be. "How are you—?"

She didn't bother waiting for him to finish his sentence. She squeezed the trigger, and held it there.

The Sith moved inhumanly fast, lightsaber a solid barrier of red light, the bolts hissing against walls and terminals and ceiling instead. Through the eye-dazzling chaos, she caught a flash of actinic blue.

It was cold, like the subzero winds on the mountains outside of Aldera tearing across her face, but a hundred times worse, and reaching much deeper, penetrating to the bone. It was hot, like sticking her hand in a campfire, but a hundred times worse, and running all through her, her blood replaced with magma. Like being sliced into ribbons by a million blades at once, crushed under bone-shattering weight, over and over and over. Vision cast black and white and purple, her blood rushing in her ears, it ran over her in waves, again and again and again, she couldn't get away, it was _everywhere_ , she couldn't—

The world returned with a numbing crash, leaving her shivering and gasping. She'd fallen against the deck at some point, she wasn't sure where. Her arms and legs more cramp and bruise than flesh, every nerve afire, she was so _tired_ , the cool metal of the floor felt too good against her cheek, she didn't want to get up. She just wanted to stay here, pass out right here, and let it all fall away.

But she couldn't. She could hear the crashing and crackling of the Jedi and the Sith fighting, only a few meters away, Onasi shouting right in her ear. She had to get up, if she didn't keep moving she would die.

Despite the agony setting her limbs to shaking, she pushed herself to a knee, blindly groped for the lip of a nearby terminal, pulled herself to one foot, the other. Her knees were weak, a constant shiver, her hip and ankle screaming, the bridge reduced to swirling blurs. But she stumbled forward anyway, one hand against the equipment at her side, limping forward one staggering step at a time. Toward the noise of the fighting Jedi. She didn't know what she could possibly do about that, but she wouldn't make it out of here with the Sith still alive, she had to—

Her rifle twitched up, and she fired.

And there was silence.

"Cianen, come... Come here."

She wasn't entirely conscious of doing it. She was so tired, so numb, her body seemed to move on its own. She was limping across the room, then she was kneeling on the floor. The Jedi, Annas, she was sitting there, half thrown over one of the chairs at the front of the bridge, arms and legs limply hanging. There were burns scattered over her, legs and arms, one over her shoulder, the cloth burned away to reveal blackened skin. That wasn't the worst, a bloody pit weeping above her hips, bits of sharpened metal gleaming, flesh shredded into ribbons.

Even with the details muddied by the foam filling her head, she knew at a glance Annas wasn't going to make it.

"You have to..." The Jedi was reaching toward her, bloody fingers grasping blindly in the air. She took her hand, and nearly fell over when the Jedi yanked, wrenching her wrist down and twisting. "You, find Bastila." Annas slid a cylinder of warm metal into her hand, clenched her fingers around it with her own. A lightsaber, she knew with a start. "Go back... You must. Everything, everything dep... You _must_."

She really didn't know what to say to that. She wasn't even certain what the Jedi was trying to tell her. So she just nodded.

"Go." The Jedi patted the back of her hand, still trapped around her lightsaber, her touch wet with blood. "Go." And she let go.

She straightened, so far as she was actually capable of standing at the moment, clipped the lightsaber onto the ammo belt, over her hip. She hefted her stolen blaster rifle. After a short, tense sort of pause, the Jedi nodded.

The high-powered bolt burned through her skull, and Annas died instantly.

* * *

 _Setting the useless hunk of crap on the table with a light thunk, Meetra said, "I still don't see what the point of this is."_

 _Lesami's head raised an inch, glancing across the table at her. Thankfully, she wasn't wearing that absurd Mandalorian mask of hers at the moment — she was confident enough in the base's security to go without. So Meetra got a full view of the mild glare Lesami was throwing her, unfiltered voice touched with exasperation. "You can't even guess? That's disappointing. And here Kreia said you were clever."_

 _Meetra twitched at the mention of that particular Jedi Master. They didn't exactly get along. Honestly, she was a little surprised she'd spoken well of her to Lesami at all. "I can't believe I'm going to be charging into battle with blasters and grenades."_

" _Grenades are useful." With a sharp motion, Lesami finished whatever she was doing with the rifle, something sliding home with a deep snapping noise, a high whine of electronics powering on. She set the thing down on the table, pointed carefully off to the side, before looking up again. "But no, I wouldn't expect you to use blasters much."_

" _Then what is the bloody point?"_

 _Lesami sighed, her eyes tipping up toward the ceiling._

 _Over the next minutes, Meetra didn't get her answer. Lesami crouched next to her at the table, walked her through how to replace the gas cartridge, the power cell — she had her practice that several times until she could do it quick enough she was satisfied. Even snapping the thing apart to replace the entire barrel and the emitter worked into the base which, though Republic soldiers always carried a single replacement, only ever failed in extreme circumstances. She had her fumbling over the tuners and settings, quizzing her every so often, going nearly back to the beginning whenever she got anything wrong. And on and on and on and on._

 _By the end, Meetra was struggling to not show her growing frustration. Master Vima hadn't taken so long to explain the basic operation of a lightsaber, and that was something she_ actually used _._

 _And the long, condescending lecture about how to hold the thing and not point it at anything she didn't want dead, which should really go without saying, was just annoying._

 _And then there was the actual shooting. It wasn't by any means difficult — leaning into the Force to augment her aim turned the entire exercise into child's play. She didn't always hit the center of the targets, but she couldn't miss entirely. It did feel a little weird, firing the thing. Sympathetic vibrations from the magnetic accelerators, she knew, a side-effect of slight imperfections in manufacture. Her hands felt a bit tingly and numb after a while, which was making her aim slightly clumsier, but it wasn't that bad._

 _What the whole thing was was tedious. Lesami had her firing down the range at nearby stationary targets, then further, then further. Then moving targets, first moving smoothly, then more quickly and erratically. All kinds of nonsense she had her do, they had to be at it for an hour._

 _They were at it long enough they weren't alone anymore. They'd come in very early in the morning, when people who couldn't refresh themselves with a half hour of meditation would still be sleeping. It must have been hours, a slow trickle of off-duty soldiers in street clothes finding their way into the range for practice. Mostly ordinary soldiers, anyway — Meetra recognized two beings she knew were Jedi, part of Lesami's entourage. Though they were Temple Jedi, Meetra didn't even know their names. On their way in, most of them acknowledged Lesami one way or another, lazy salutes or waves, a litany of "Commander" as they walked past. A few actually stopped for a quick chat, but Meetra wasn't really listening. The enormous room gradually filled with a low rumble of muttered conversation, the clinking and snapping of blasters being fiddled with, the screech of bolts scorching the air._

 _Eventually, Meetra's patience ran out. Popping out yet another expended power cell, she whirled around to face Lesami, keeping the note of annoyance off her voice only from long practice. "I'm sorry, Lesami, but is there a point to all this?"_

 _The tiny little woman stared up at her, one eyebrow slowly ticking up. "Still haven't figured it out?"_

" _Why don't you just come out and tell me?"_

 _Lesami sighed, her eyes glancing away. Then her head tilted a little, a brief frown crossing her face before being replaced with a warm smile. "Captain. Good to see you on your feet again."_

 _Glancing that direction, Meetra spotted a Cathar man, walking by only a couple meters away. He'd obviously had recent surgery, the fur shaved away across half his head, a few other places visible on his arms, giving him a lopsided, ruffled sort of look. "No one's more pleased than I am, Commander." He walked toward their booth, a noticeable limp in his left leg. It must have hurt, but still his eyes were curled into a smile, his voice light. "My men tell me I have you to thank for getting me back alive."_

" _Oh, piss on that." Lesami flipped her fingers in a harsh, dismissive wave. "Just doing my job. Anyone else in my position would have done the same."_

" _Of course, Commander." Meetra was less than familiar with his species, but she had the feeling that was amusement on his voice._

" _Anyway, you have great timing." Coaxing the injured soldier closer with one hand, Lesami turned back to Meetra. "This is Captain Rashah Suun, commander of Tinna Company. Captain, this is Meetra Surik, the best lightsaber duelist of our generation." Meetra instinctively opened her mouth to deny the superlative statement, then closed it again. It was probably accurate._

 _Suun blinked. "I thought that was Squint."_

" _Only in his dreams," Lesami said, her smile tilting into something more like a smirk. "I've been giving Meetra here a rundown on standard-issue weaponry, and she can't seem to figure out why I bother. Think you can give me a hand?"_

" _Sure thing." Suun took a few steps closer, practically coming into the booth with them, Lesami moving around behind Meetra to give him room. He poked at the controls to the side for a bit. "We're under fire, take all these out as quickly as you can."_

 _Meetra glanced down the range, seeing her alley was filled with a dozen targets, the shielded droids darting all over the place. With a sigh, she slipped a fresh power cell into her rifle, flicked it into full auto, and mowed them all down. At this point, it wasn't even slightly difficult anymore. The thick stream of fire hit one, another, another, pinging the last even as the low power warning beeped at her. She popped out the expended cell, grabbing a fresh one with numbed fingers._

" _Oh shit, there are more."_

 _With a quick look at Lesami, finding only an implacable stare containing not a hint of mercy, Meetra turned back outward. This time there were a couple more, but she managed to hit them all, using every single shot._

" _There's one more, quick, take him!"_

 _Meetra jumped — either she'd missed one, or Suun had activated another when she hadn't been looking. She yanked back on the release, the depleted power cell clattering to the ground, grabbed a fresh one, slammed it in—_

 _The cell skated off the lip of the slot, she nearly drove the thing into her own arm. Meetra made a couple more attempts, but her fingers were too numb from firing so many shots in so short a time, she couldn't get the cell aligned properly. Turning the rifle a little so she could see it, holding the cell closer to the top, she finally got it to slip in. She brought the thing back up, lined up the shot, fired...and missed. "Dammit."_

" _Are Jedi supposed to curse?"_

" _Depends on the Jedi. Most of them are fucking prudes, though."_

 _Meetra shot Lesami an exasperated glare over her shoulder. The so frequently aggravating woman just smiled back at her, eyes dancing. "Okay, this is fun, but we'll be getting to the point soon."_

 _Instead of either of them answering, Suun poked at the controls some more. She glanced that way to see a single, stationary target, floating there halfway down the range. "Stun this one."_

 _A quick flick of a switch, and Meetra fired. Stun bolts, due to the radically different composition of the energy packet, moved far more slowly. Of course, "far more slowly" was relative — something flashing by at twice the speed of sound certainly seemed slow compared to something pushing half the speed of light. The point was, the bluish blaster bolt was actually visible for an instant, lancing out toward the waiting droid...before fizzling out, decohering into a harmless cloud of sparks a few meters short. "What the— Oh, the packet's too loose, isn't it, it falls apart from air friction."_

 _She turned in time to catch Suun's nod. "It depends on the composition of the atmosphere a bit, but generally speaking even your high-powered stun bolt has a range of about thirty meters. And, you would have noticed, the more shots you fire the clumsier you get. It wears off pretty quickly, if you take breaks between bursts, but you can't always do that. We have far more practice dealing with it than you do, but even we'll fumble sometimes."_

" _I suspect," Lesami said, her smile gone a bit absent, "that you might have guessed stun bolts have a more limited range. At least, if it occurred to you to think about it. But how numb firing a blaster can make your hands would be new."_

 _Meetra frowned. "Well, yeah, I didn't know that. So?"_

 _His face contorting into a snarl she felt must be a Cathar equivalent to the human smirk, Suun said, "If you don't know someone's capabilities and limitations, how the hell are you supposed to fight alongside them?"_

 _There really wasn't anything she could think to say. She hadn't even thought of that._

 _After a short pause, Suun giving Meetra a look she was trying to avoid thinking of as smug, Lesami spoke. "Thank you, Captain. You can get back to whatever you were doing."_

" _Commander, Master Jedi." A quick pair of nods, and Suun turned away, started limping off again._

 _Once he was out of earshot, disappearing into the low-key chaos of the shooting range, Meetra turned back to Lesami. "That's it? I mean, we're spending so long going over all this stuff, and..."_

 _Lesami gave her an odd look, seeming to be half-amused and half-exasperated. "It's rather important, don't you think? I can't be sending you out with a platoon until you at least know the basics. How are you supposed to lead worth a damn if you don't know what the options are?"_

" _I... Well, I guess it didn't occur to me."_

" _You're not the only one, none of us knew what we were doing at first." Lesami reached over, switched off the rifle Meetra was still holding. She turned around, started walking for the door out, pointing Meetra off to the storage racks with a nod. While Meetra got everything situated away — which took longer than it probably should, she fumbled getting the gas cartridge out — Lesami waited, fingers tapping at one of her arms, crossed over her stomach. "It led to a few...difficulties. I can't tell you how many times I got into shouting matches with Major Nothrian and even the Admiral. I had to learn, like everyone else._

" _It's something we Jedi aren't taught, you know," she said, leading Meetra out the door. By the first couple turns she took through the tight, empty halls, probably toward the mess. "How to fight with non-Jedi, I mean. Oh, we do get combat training, of course, but it's all geared toward a very particular sort of combat. A small number of Jedi against a similar number of Sith, or against some group of criminals or militants. Our training regiment isn't designed with proper battles in mind. Which is by design, the Council believes Jedi have no business fighting in wars."_

 _Meetra shrugged. "In any other situation they might have been right. They couldn't have anticipated the naked barbarism of the Mandalorian method of war. With the Republic unwilling to take the threat seriously, we had to do something." Of course, the Republic was taking the Mandalorians seriously_ now _, they'd just taken too long. If not for the Revanchists, the Republic might have moved too late, and it was already a close thing, the Mandalorians pouring through the Slice virtually unchecked._

 _Somewhat to her surprise, Lesami shot an unimpressed glare over her shoulder, sudden and sharp enough Meetra jumped. "Any student of history could have anticipated this. The Senate has demonstrated a consistent pattern of caring little for conditions on the rim. If things had gone differently, they might have ignored the Mandalorians right up until they invaded the Arrowhead. The Order, despite our traditional insistence we are not an army, have found ourselves pulled into one war after another, all through the history of the Republic. None of this is new. The 'barbarism' of the Mandalorians isn't even unusual. We may like to think we're an enlightened people, that we have rules of engagement, but those rules are almost always abandoned once the fighting starts. War_ is _barbaric. Nothing will ever change that._

" _But that's not the point," Lesami said, waving the topic away. "You'll hear all these people who think they're great military geniuses talking about how you have to know your enemy. Above all else, you have to know your enemy. But too many of them miss something critically important: no matter how thoroughly knowledgeable you are about the people you're fighting, it's useless if you don't understand_ your own people _. And I'm not just talking about their training and weaponry. Have you studied the Seventh Alsakan Conflict in detail?"_

 _Meetra blinked. "I know the basics, of course, but not really." The Seventh Conflict was, at its core, a civil war within the Pius Dea Republic. It'd been going on for some time, the theocratic, xenophobic perversion of the Republic scrambling to suppress one rebellion of some non-human species, then another, then another._

 _Eventually the Jedi, having abandoned the former democracy nearly a millennium previously, joined forces with the Alsakani, who had seceded with near on a third of the known galaxy to form their own, far more enlightened state. They entered the war on the side of the rebels, liberated the core, and overthrew the Contispex dynasty. For a century afterward, during what is now called Reconstruction, Alsakan operated as the_ de facto _capital of the Republic, Coruscant essentially under military occupation. In the aftermath, the Alsakani donated to the Order the land on which the Temple now stood, charging them to keep a closer eye on the political climate on Coruscant to stop such a thing from ever happening again. Beyond that, Meetra didn't know anything more about the period._

 _When studying history, the primary impression one came away with was that galactic civilization was_ old — _the Constitution of the Republic had been signed over twenty-one thousand years ago, and the Order had been around in one form or another even longer. No matter how much someone might want to, it was impossible to study it all. Even experts were only knowledgeable of a certain period or topic. Beyond recent centuries and the Hundred Year Darkness, Meetra had only a rough impression of major events._

" _Well, the traditional narrative focuses on the various regional rebellions, the influence of the Jedi, the meddling of the Alsakani and the Corellians, but it was more complicated than that. Only devout members of the Faith were allowed to ascend to any sort of significant rank in their military, but full on a_ third _of them defected. They were ordered to kill rebels, dissidents, even protestors. Firing into crowds, harmless people. One Crusade after another, scorching worlds from orbit, wiping out billions of people, entire species. These commanders, they were moral beings — pius beings, as they would put it. The xenophobic brainwashing they'd all undergone could only hold against such atrocities for so long. In time it was too much, and they broke with Coruscant, turned their guns against the very empire they'd been serving, pleaded with the Jedi and Alsakani to join their cause. Without the Renunciates, the Pius Dea Republic wouldn't have fallen nearly as swiftly as it did._

" _See, Meetra, you have to understand your own people. Not just their capabilities, but how they feel, what they_ believe _. How can you command an army if you don't know what it can do? How can you lead anyone if you don't know what moves them, their passions, their dreams, their fears?" As Lesami spoke, they walked into the mess, dozens of soldiers packed around them, the noise of clinking and chattering and laughing a physical weight pressing against Meetra's skull. Lesami didn't slow, but she wasn't watching where she was going, her eyes instead sweeping over the room, taking in them all with the intensity of a student at lecture. "Any leader who doesn't understand the skills, hearts, and minds of her own people is doomed to failure, sooner or later. Do you understand now?"_

" _Lesami, with the way you go on, if I didn't get it by now I'd be concerned for my own intelligence." The thought had occurred to her before, if Lesami hadn't been drawn out to war by the Mandalorians she'd probably have become one of the instructors back at the Temple. That is, assuming the Council would permit it — as knowledgeable and even professorial as she could get at times, Lesami was hardly the most dogmatic of Jedi._

 _In fact, Meetra thought she understood rather more than she was meant to. She hadn't missed the faint note of admiration on Lesami's voice as she'd spoken of the Renunciates._

 _Unease hung over her at the thought, a distracting tingle crawling across the back of her neck._

* * *

Her heart pounding in her throat, her blood filled with fire, she jerked, snapped up to sitting. Or, at least, she _tried_ to — her head didn't move a millimeter, locked solidly in place against her pillow.

No, not a pillow. The realization bubbled up from somewhere deep under the surface, drawn out by the odd weight draped over her, the scrambling of feet and the shouting of voices and blaring of alarms. The patches of an odd, cold, sticky wetness here and there across her body, numb but distracting. Bacta patches. She wasn't on a bed, not really. She was in a medcenter somewhere. They'd immobilized her, but not all of her, she could still move her hands and feet. CNS trauma, they thought she had a cranial or spinal injury.

Judging by the hot throbbing in her head, they weren't far wrong about that.

"Good, you're awake." An arm, sleeve pale and skin dark, drifted into view, a manual hypo slung in its fingers. A doctor, had to be, only professionals used those, judging by the texture of his skin a human one. She felt an odd wave of cold through her neck as whatever was in there was injected into her blood. In an instant, the agony in her head diminished, the heat of what must have been an adrenal of some kind fizzling out. "Can you speak? I need you to ask a few questions for me."

She worked her tongue for a moment, her mouth dry and filled with ash. The doctor leaned over her, some device she didn't recognize held in his hand, pressed close to her forehead. He was an older man, dark skin thinly wrinkled, white shot through his bushy eyebrows and mustache. Her voice came out as more croak than speech. "Shoot, Doc."

"What's your name?"

For a brief, disorienting moment, she couldn't remember. But then it came, floating out of the fuzziness that filled her head. "Cianen," she said, but even as she said it, she felt... It felt like knowledge, a fact she'd learned somewhere, but she didn't quite...

"Nice to meet you, Cianen. My name is Zelka."

"Charmed."

His mustache twitched with the shadow of a smile. "Do you have any chronic medical conditions I should know about?"

"No."

"Count down from twenty-five by threes for me."

She got down to ten before he stopped her.

"Do you know where you are?"

"...Taris?"

"Is that a question?"

"I was in an escape pod..."

Zelka nodded. Whatever he was doing, there was an odd tension in the side of her head. It didn't hurt, exactly, it just felt...weird. "Yes, you're on Taris. Name as many of the Core Founders as you can."

She hesitated, but just for a second. "Alderaan, Coruscant, Alsakan, Caamas, Shaw-Shawken, Corellia, Duro, Tepasi, Chandrila, Brentaal, Axum, Anaxes, Kuat, Rendili, Iphigin, Humba—"

"Stop, stop. What was the first question I asked you?"

"What's my— No, can I speak."

"Right." Zelka lifted whatever that thing was away from her head, a wave of dizziness sweeping over her before vanishing again. "You're going to be fine. You have some bruising, and what looks like light burns from grazing shots, but none of that looks serious. I know they can itch, but try not to scratch at the bacta patches, we can probably take them off tomorrow. You did have a concussion and a mild cranial hemorrhage, but I was able to repair the damage, and the swelling went down with meds. However, you might still be dizzy for some hours yet, so I recommend you keep off your feet. Oh, and, if you can't hear out of your left ear that's normal, we'll look at it again if it isn't better in a day or two.

"Did you have any questions for me?"

That didn't sound too bad. Considering everyone else in the hall she'd woken up in had died, and how completely out of her depth she'd been fighting her way to the escape pods, that actually sounded pretty fucking good. "Nah, I'm good. Let me up, maybe?"

"Oh, of course, sorry." There were a few little beeps to her side, and the invisible bands holding her in place loosened, her head sagging to the side a bit before she caught it. "If you're going to be moving around, just try not to get in—"

"Doctor! We're losing this one!"

"Shit." Zelka swept through the side of her vision, running off deeper into the room, shouting about combined adrenals and unisubs. Before long, she lost his voice in the cacophony filling the room to bursting.

Her arms weak, her head tingling and floating, she pushed herself upright. She was right about the medcenter thing, obviously. The clinic had maybe twenty beds, metals and plastics cast in antiseptic whites and greens, the walls lined with cabinets and coolers and all kinds of equipment she didn't know enough about medicine to recognize on sight. The place was a mess, most of the beds occupied with mangled and bleeding men and women wearing torn and blackened fragments of Republic uniforms, the floor between packed with beings. A few wore white and green uniforms, clearly medical staff of some kind, but the majority were in street clothes, running the gamut all the way from the casual comfort of the upper middle class to the rags of the destitute.

A thought floated up from somewhere deep beneath the surface: _volunteers_. It happened, all the time, in emergency situations, citizens of conscience pouring in off the streets to give medical professionals any assistance they could. By the paucity of staff she could make out in the crowd, and just how many patients they seemed to have, she was betting they could use the help.

She watched — passive, empty — as Zelka and a handful of aides scrambled to keep someone alive, the patient completely obscured by the people around them. For long minutes they worked, until, letting out an explosive curse she could hear from across the room, Zelka jerked a sheet down the bed, and sidled over to the next patient, jumping straight into motion.

Less than a minute later, a pair of Ithorians appeared, lifted the body off the bed, and disappeared out the door. With that kind of coordination, that couldn't be the first corpse they'd moved today.

"You're still alive. That's something."

She jumped, jerked around to look over her shoulder. The sudden movement had her head spinning, she closed her eyes a moment to fight back the nausea. There was a man standing there, a human man, just a couple steps from the bed. Dark hair fashioned by sweat into spikes, dark eyes shadowed by a frown, the masculine sort of face you got weird looks for calling _pretty_. It wasn't until after she caught the two blaster pistols at his waist, ineffectively hidden by a padded leather jacket, that the name came to her. "Onasi. Don't look too happy. I wouldn't want to think you care." The sarcasm came easy, natural, right.

But Onasi didn't seem to take it well, his frown narrowing as he turned to her. It took him a moment to find his words, she could almost hear his teeth grinding. "We're the only ones likely to live so far."

She blinked. She looked out into the room, the beds filled with wounded Republic men and women, the streets, the skies filled with who knew how many more.

Oh.

The thought of all those people, thousands of them, wounded and dying and dead — and for no real purpose, it'd been a trap, she had _warned_ them — left her feeling...exhausted. Not an exhaustion of the body, but more a sort of heavy despair falling over her. She _could_ get up, but a part of her didn't want to. A part of her just wanted to lie back and rest, rest and never rise. To give up on the outside galaxy, let it tear itself apart without her. A part of her, a deep, visceral thing rising from the very core of her, was tired, so very _tired_ , and didn't want to do this anymore.

Even as the thoughts, the feelings crashed over her, like waves striking shore, she slowly grew confused. That reaction didn't make any sense. What exactly was she so tired of, what didn't she want to do anymore? Cianen had never been in this sort of situation before. If anything, she should be in shock, not... It didn't make any sense.

Except she had, she had been here before. All these people who had died, it hadn't been necessary, she'd _warned_ them, she should have done more, she should have _made_ those idiots see. This feeling, she could have done _something_ , it was painful, it was overwhelming, it was depressing.

And it was familiar. It was unpleasant, yes, but in an odd way...natural. Like she'd felt like this before, far too many times before.

It didn't make any sense.

But it wasn't the first thing that had happened lately that didn't make any sense. Over the years, she'd studied more languages than she could remember, needed both hands to count the ones she spoke fluently. But, in her time on Coruscant, waiting for the Jedi to clear her, she'd overheard a few languages she was pretty sure she'd never studied before. Dosh, Yuska Rodese, a Devaronian language she didn't even know the name of, whatever the hell the Givin spoke, Ithorian, Anash Zeltrosi. She didn't remember studying any of them, but she understood every word she heard, as easily as though it were Basic. She'd even held a few full conversations in Caamasi, which she had studied theoretically, but certainly hadn't practiced to the point of fluency.

And that hadn't been the only thing about Coruscant that had felt, just, familiar. She'd made excuses about it to herself, that the core worlds were culturally and architecturally similar, it just reminded her of Alderaan, it meant nothing. But she'd been fooling herself, she knew that now. The Capitol District looked _nothing_ like Aldera, the aesthetics were similar but the layout of the buildings wildly different. She'd never gotten lost in the Jedi Temple, she'd never gotten lost anywhere.

Except, one time, she sort of had. One night, the Jedi had finally released her rather late, the sun had long set by the time she was getting into her rented airspeeder. She'd flown without thinking, landed at an apartment building, only a couple miles away, very fancy. On autopilot, she'd walked the halls, rode the turbolifts, came to a particular door. She'd only stopped when she'd reached for a security chit that wasn't there, and belatedly realized she had no clue where she was, what she was doing.

And on the _Spire_. The D-213 and C-206, the blaster pistols and rifle she'd picked up, she knew everything about them. She knew who'd designed them, and when, she knew where they were manufactured, she knew their charge tolerances and power ranges and rates of fire, she knew all of it. She didn't know where she'd learned any of that.

And she knew how to use them. She'd killed people with them. But she'd never touched a blaster in her life, Cianen had never even _slapped_ anyone before.

And yet it'd felt...

She leaned forward on the bed, resting her elbows on her knees. Avoiding the bandage she felt at the side of her head, she rubbed her temples, the effort useless against the spinning, the throbbing, the lurching of her stomach.

Something was seriously wrong with her.

She was saved from her own thoughts a few minutes later. A group of locals showed up, carrying between them a figure in a Republic flightsuit.

A Bothan with black fur.

* * *

Kreia — _There's a fan theory that Kreia and Arren Kae, the mother of Brianna from KotOR II, are the same person. I'm not incorporating that theory. While Arren was Lesami's primary lightsaber instructor at the Temple, she was more Kreia's apprentice than anyone's._

Hundred Year Darkness — _A civil war amongst the Jedi (and, by extension, the Republic) following the Second Schism. (7000 BBY, about three thousand years before KotOR.) After being defeated, the survivors of the Dark Jedi were exiled from the Republic, where they eventually stumbled into Sith space and reformed the feuding clans into an empire. And we all know how that went._

Pius Dea Renunciates and the Seventh Alsakan Conflict — _This is all canon, by the way. Well, pre-Disney canon. When I say "canon", assume I mean the EU before Disney came around and axed all of it._

* * *

 _So, here's a thing._

 _It's a weird coincidence. I just started reading a fic where the plot is thrown a bit off when the MC gets a head injury on the_ Spire _, kicking the implanted personality a bit askew. Which was my plan from the beginning. (Though, the Jedi kind of fucked it up in the first place, not the point.) Apparently, my ideas aren't as original as I think they are. xD_

 _Until next time,  
~Wings_


	5. Taris — I

"And why should I help you again?"

Roughly half a day later, and Zelka's clinic had emptied considerably. Most of the beds were empty, all of the volunteers were cleared out, leaving only a skeleton staff of Zelka and a couple techs to look after the survivors. Not that there were many of those — the only ones left were a half dozen Zelka had stuck in bacta tanks (the only one she recognized was Ferlip), none of whom he expected to survive. Asyr, though, was going to make it. She was laid out on one of the beds, lines sticking out of her arms and monitors beeping, looking rather odd with patches of her fur shaved off and covered in kolto patches, lopsided. She'd woken up briefly, a couple hours after she'd been brought in, Zelka was sure she'd recover.

If she'd had any reason to doubt Asyr was tough as nails, they'd all been dispelled now. From what she could tell, reading between the lines of what the people who'd brought her in had said, Asyr had taken a glancing blow in orbit, frying her fighter's electronics, sending her into a freefall towards the surface. She must have pulled some emergency rewiring right there in the cockpit, because she managed to fire her repulsorlifts hard just before landing, shattering glass and flinging trash and debris into the air. She still crashed, of course, but she survived.

Apparently, she'd even managed to fight off the thugs from some swoop gang who had been the first on the scene. The people who'd brought her to Zelka had found her sitting with her back against her ruined ship, half-conscious, one hand clutched over a bleeding wound in her side and the other around a blaster, surrounded by perforated and smoking corpses.

She wasn't even really surprised. Bothans did make a point of being unreasonably good at everything they did.

She was sitting in a chair next to Asyr's bed, watching her sleep. Mostly, if she were being honest with herself, out of a lack of any better ideas on what she should be doing. Taris was Sith-controlled, and as far as she knew there wasn't a University campus. She doubted there was even an Alderaanian consulate here anymore — there would have been before, of course, but they'd likely fled ahead of the Sith. She'd been forming a vague idea of looking around for a bank she knew, see if she could access her accounts and buy her way off planet, but she hadn't been seriously thinking about it yet.

Her head still swam sometimes, thinking too hard hurt.

It wasn't the only thing giving her a headache. Onasi was making an enormous bloody nuisance of himself. He was standing over her, arms crossed firmly over his chest, brow lowered in an angry glare. An angry glare that wasn't turned directly at her — once she'd woken up enough to pay attention to such things, she'd realized she wasn't exactly wearing much. Which hadn't come as much of a surprise, she wouldn't expect her clothes had been any good anymore.

He might be avoiding looking at her for more than a couple seconds at a time, but he sure wasn't shy about lecturing at her. "You swore an oath to the Republic, same as me."

She frowned up at him. "Um, _no_ , I didn't."

Rolling his eyes, Onasi let out something between an exhausted sigh and an irritated scoff. "Come off it, I know already. No reason to go on playing dumb."

"Know what?"

"Granted, I have no idea _why_ the Jedi made such a big fuss of going all the way to Coruscant to pick up a SecInt agent, but—"

"SecInt?" Even as she repeated it, the abbreviation filled itself out in her head. "Wait, _Security and Intelligence Service?_ You think I'm with Republic counter-intelligence?"

Onasi forced out another thick sigh. "Yes, _obviously_. The mission's gone completely fubar, you might as well quit the act."

For a short moment, she could only stare, her mouth working silently. "What the fuck makes you think I'm an intelligence agent?"

"Am I supposed to believe you learned to shoot like that back home on Shelkonwa?" Onasi let out a scoff, shaking his head to himself. "Hell, I'd never even thought of turning a blaster into a grenade like that until I saw you do it, didn't know it was possible."

"Well, no one _taught_ me to do it! I just... I just realized I could."

"I guess you _just realized_ you could fight while you were at it."

The sarcasm was obvious, but the words had her coming up short, the building irritation abruptly draining away. "Yes, actually, that's exactly how it went."

"I'm serious, this isn't the time to—" Onasi turned, clearly intending to yell at her, but he suddenly froze. The glare shifted, turning less angry and more confused. "You're not just messing with me, are you."

It wasn't really a question. "No, I'm not. I had no idea I could do any of that. I think..." She broke off, turning to frown down at the table. Not at Asyr, not even at the table itself, really, just in that general direction, unfocused. She bit her lip, turning the thought around for a moment. "I think my memory's been modified."

"What? How is that—" Onasi broke off before he'd even finished the sentence, eyes going wide. When he spoke again his voice was lower, cautious, as though speaking of it too loudly would make it more real. "I've heard terrible things, of what the Force can do to a person. Mess with memories, drive you insane, destroy everything you are." Eyes going softer, just the slightest note of pity, "You don't think...?"

"If some Jedi did do this to me, they did a pretty shoddy job." Not all of her mind had been altered — her explicit and implicit memories didn't match, implying they came from different sources. And she had plenty of semantic memory that didn't fit either. It was almost like whoever had done it had only gone for her episodic memory. Which, well, that _was_ what most people thought of when they said the word "memory", but the subject was actually far more complicated than that.

The really weird thing was, she hadn't even noticed anything was wrong until she'd woken up during the battle. There had been a few odd moments on Coruscant, but none of those had been jarring enough for her to really notice at the time. But on the _Spire_... It was like that hit to her head had shaken something loose, the fictions stitching together _everything she was_ , as Onasi had put it, starting to fray apart.

She was starting to suspect it might be one hell of a mess in here. She'd been trying to not think about it. Had been doing pretty well, too, until Onasi had gone and stuck his handsome nose in it.

"This sounds more like something a Sith would do. Hey, there's a thought..."

She waited a moment for Onasi, eyes staring unfocused into the near distance, to put words to whatever he was thinking about, before giving up and asking. "Going to share this thought of yours?"

He blinked, turned a dense look down on her. Tired, sad, pitying. "Maybe you _were_ a Republic agent, and you were captured. The Sith tortured you, broke your mind. The Republic recovered you, but it was too late. The Jedi fixed your head up as much as they could, but— Hey!" he said, eyes going wide, excitement slipping into his tone. "Maybe that's why they want you on Dantooine! Maybe whatever they were bringing you there for has something to do with your last assignment, they might be trying to help you remember."

That was ludicrous. She opened her mouth to say so, then froze, let it fall closed again. She couldn't honestly say it was impossible. She had no better explanation.

A frown narrowed her eyes — Coruscant. The weird events, knowing things she couldn't explain knowing, it had started on Coruscant. The Jedi had insisted on an overlong interview, stretched over several days, before confirming her for the project. Felt more like a psychological evaluation than anything. It'd seemed strange and excessive at the time, but the Jedi could be strange and excessive, she hadn't thought...

Come to think of it, how had she even gotten to Coruscant in the first place? There were shuttles from Alderaan all the time, but she couldn't remember...

"I think you're right," she said, the words slow and cautious. "Well, I can't say about the Republic agent part and the thing on Dantooine one way or the other, but I think the Jedi might have been helping me. The confusing moments started on Coruscant, they were asking me all these questions that had nothing to do with the job. I don't even remember getting there, I think..."

The thought had her teetering on the edge of a black, yawning pit, her stomach rising up her throat, a sudden frigid wave flashing over her head to toe. The thought was terrible, horrifying, part of her rebelled against it, so hard she felt the beginning of tears sting at her eyes. But at the same time, she knew it, she _knew_. No matter how awful the truth was, as soon as she saw it she couldn't make herself unsee.

"It's all fake. Me, I mean, my life, everything. The Jedi made the whole thing up."

Onasi said nothing, falling into blessed silence for what felt the first time in hours. But he was looking at her. The rigidity had gone out of his stance, the glare had disappeared entirely, his face had gone soft. There was warmth in his eyes, filled with pity.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, her stomach tightened with hot fury, her teeth clenching. She didn't want his pity, she hated feeling— She straightened in her chair, cleared her throat, trying to work the anger out of her voice. "So, in light of all this, explain to me again why I should help you find Jedi Shan. I can't see what it has to do with me, honestly."

"She's—" Onasi broke off again, frowning to himself. "I guess you have no obligation to. I think I'm right, that you were a Republic agent, but if you don't remember it, you may as well not be. But it's really quite simple. The Republic won't survive long without Bastila. I don't pretend to understand how this Force stuff works, but..."

He wasn't entirely wrong about that — however exactly that _battle meditation_ thing worked, it was clear even to her, who knew little in the way of details about how the war was going, that the Republic had little chance without it. Anyone not blinded by denial could see it. The Sith were just too many.

"Do you _want_ Malak in charge of the galaxy?"

"No." The word tore from her lips, automatic but harsh. Malak might have been a great man once, but these days he was nothing more than a bloodthirsty maniac. The Republic had serious flaws, she couldn't deny that, but an empire ruled by Malak would be a hundred times worse.

She still thought the Jedi had made a serious miscalculation when they'd decided to assassinate Revan. She might have seemed the bigger threat to the Republic, but at least she'd been a reasonable human being. Malak was...something else. It hadn't accomplished anything, it'd just made everything worse.

And besides, she'd been under the impression the Republic considered assassinating political leadership to be a war crime. But she didn't expect the Jedi to _not_ be hypocrites.

Onasi gave her a crooked, cocky smile, laughter dancing in his eyes, and, damn him, she'd forgotten how handsome he was, smirking like that. Not making her any less annoyed. "Then I guess you have no choice. This is gonna be hard enough with the two of us, you know, there's no way in hell I can do it by myself."

She jerked her head to the side, gritting her teeth. The irritating little shit was right. Malak would be the death of billions if he wasn't stopped. If there was anything she could do to rescue Bastila, get her back on the front lines where she belonged, she had to do it. She had no choice.

No, that wasn't exactly right. She did have a choice — nothing was _forcing_ her to help, she didn't _need_ to. But if she didn't, if she could stop it and did nothing, at least a portion of the blood of those billions would be on her hands. She _chose_ to not accept that.

 _There is_ always _a choice._

Her head went floaty again, she shook it off. It took her a second to remember where exactly they'd been in the conversation, she'd gone off for a moment there, disoriented. "You might have forgotten, you're not alone. You have Asyr."

Onasi shook his head. "Unfortunately, she won't be going anywhere for at least a couple days. Face it, Hayal, you're all I've got."

Dammit. The little shit was right. Again.

She really hoped he wasn't going to get into the habit of doing that.

She let out a long, heavy sigh, staring up at the ceiling. The bright, too-white lights stung at her eyes, but she ignored it. "I don't suppose we could find me some clothes first?"

Clearly pleased by her surrender, Onasi gave her another smirk. And there he went being far too handsome again.

Yeah, let's hope _that_ wasn't going to become a habit of his either.

* * *

She stepped out into artificial twilight, the towers stretching far over her head reducing the sky to a thin blue band. Still staring upward, not turning to him, she asked Onasi, "So, did you actually have a plan in mind, or are we just going to wander around until we hear someone in the middle of a prissy lecture?"

"Bastila hasn't been captured yet, so she's probably somewhere in the lower levels. The Sith presence is thinner the lower you go."

"We should set up a base first. It could take days to find her, we'll need somewhere to sleep."

"Right, of course. The alien quarter of the capital isn't far from here. There might be abandoned apartments pretty close to the top, with how xenophobic Tarisians can be."

She blinked in confusion for a second, then nodded. Right, she knew about that — the original colonists of the planet had been human, other beings only immigrating as trade took off in the last couple centuries. The Tarisians had gotten used to being the only species on the planet, and hadn't handled the diversification of their population at all well. Non-humans were second-class citizens, the ones that were even citizens at all. The alien quarter of the upper levels this close to the center of the capital would be nearly empty.

The suggestion there would be empty apartments made sense, but she was less than convinced claiming one was a good idea. She glanced to the side, shooting him a look. "You might want to get your short-term memory checked, Onasi."

He was far less handsome when he was glaring at her. Which was just an additional reason to annoy him as often as possible. "And here I thought you were the one with memory issues."

Part of her wanted to be angry at him for throwing that back at her, but it didn't even hurt, really. And honestly, she preferred to avoid thinking about that as much as possible. She couldn't have an existential crisis if she just ignored the matter entirely. "You _just said_ the Sith presence is thinner the lower you go. I was assuming you would prefer to not be arrested but, hey, I'm not the Republic officer here. If you want to walk into their arms, be my guest."

"I suppose you have a better idea," he said, scowling.

"I'm sure we can find somewhere we can hole up further down. Near a market or cantina of some kind, if possible."

And that scowl just got deeper, his lip curling enough she could see his teeth. "So we can be killed in our sleep by a gang thug or some random thief."

She shrugged. "Sith thugs or criminal thugs. Take your pick. I think the Sith are a greater threat, myself."

For a few seconds, Onasi just stared at her, and she stared back, an eyebrow slowly crawling up her forehead. Then he threw his head back, let out a harsh sigh. "And how do you suppose we get down there? You might have forgotten, but the Sith have all the turbolifts on lockdown."

"Honestly, Onasi, it's like you've never been on a city planet before." Holding out her hand, "Give me the pad." He gave her another glare, but after a few seconds he surrendered, digging the datapad Zelka had loaned them out of his pocket.

Zelka had been quite generous, actually. He'd done his best to save as many of the Republic people as he could, though admittedly there hadn't been much he could do for most of them. But he'd treated Asyr and herself, and hadn't mentioned a thing about payment. He'd gotten both of them clothes — herself because hers had been ruined, Onasi so he didn't have to walk around in a Republic uniform. Hers weren't great, true. In her size, he'd only been able to track down a too-baggy dress, leggings of some synthetic material she didn't recognize, torn and fraying in a couple places. The boots were fine, though a little too big, her feet slipped in them with every step. But she could walk around without drawing _too_ much attention, which would have to be good enough.

Not that carrying around a blaster helped with that too much. At least she'd been able to tie the lightsaber Annas had given her high up her thigh, that could have led to awkward questions. Zelka's suspicious stares had been bad enough.

He'd even given them a few credit chits and a datapad, loaded with a map of the capital. She opened that up now, waiting a moment for the outdated pad to cache, tapping her foot on the plasteel walkway. Once it was up, she scrolled around a bit, flipping between levels, looking for a tower that would work. "Got it." She marked their current location quick, so they could find their way back to the clinic later, closed the thing out. "Follow me."

Contrary to what most people believed, no two city planets were the same. They weren't even uniform in different regions of the same planet. There were, however, a few basic principles that applied to almost all of them. The simplest one involved property values — generally speaking, the wealthiest people would be nearest the top, the industrial wasteland usually found at the planetary surface inhabited by the most destitute. According to the map, and just by the look of the place, they weren't quite at the top of the towers, but certainly some ways into the upper levels. The walls around them were all chrome and glass, glimmering in the thin sunlight. The street they were walking down, actually a suspended platform a kilometer or two above the surface, was split in the middle with a garden, bushes and flowers in bloom, the air sweet and spicy, thinly populated with well-dressed, well-mannered beings (mostly humans), the occasional gleaming aircar flicking by overhead.

The lower levels, of course, wouldn't be nearly so pleasant.

The quickest way between levels were the huge, highspeed turbolifts, designed by the government just for that purpose. But, according to Zelka, since the Sith invasion the swoop gangs had risen in revolt, the lower levels were practically their own country by this point. To stop the gangs from assaulting the upper levels in force, the turbolifts were now strictly controlled.

But, see, the turbolifts were the _quickest_ way, not the _only_ way. One of those universal principles of ecumenopoli was that they were not built up evenly. They would start as ordinary, terrestrial skyscrapers. Separate buildings, of separate designs. They would spread out as far as they could, grow closer and closer together as space ran out. And then they started building up, but they couldn't tear one down and replace it with a taller one. No, there was no room. Instead, they built tower on top of tower, on top of tower, again and again. Occasionally, a walkway, called a concourse in architectural parlance, would be slapped between the towers, giving the illusion of a "ground" floor, usually every thirty stories or so. The lower structures had to be regularly reinforced, of course — on most city planets, preventing the superstructure from collapsing upon itself was a multi-billion credit construction project that never ended — but the older buildings were technically never replaced.

And therein lay the trick. The towers didn't all start and end at the same heights — just because two buildings exited onto the same concourse didn't necessarily mean this was the first floor for both of them. And each of them had their own way of getting from floor to floor inside of them, be they turbolifts or even just stairs. So, they didn't have to use the big, official, government-run turbolifts. They could just descend _inside_ the towers, gradually making their way down level by level, switching from one building to another whenever one came to a dead end. It would take longer, obviously, but it wasn't that complicated.

And no, she had no idea where all that was coming from. Before those few weeks on Coruscant, Cianen had never been on a city planet before. She certainly hadn't the experience to know any of this. But she was trying to avoid thinking about that.

She led Onasi into the tower she'd found, the inside brighter than the outside, warm lights gleaming against polished hardwood. Looked real too, nice place. Some commercial district by the look of it, stores of all kinds separated from the hallway by ceiling-high panels of glass, but that wasn't important. It was only a brief search to find a lift. They took it all the way down. It took a while, shoppers loading and unloading at nearly every floor, so she pulled out the map again, panned around a little. The bottom floor was much like the one they'd entered on, if slightly less clean, some of the stores dark. She walked off for the nearest exit, coming out onto the narrow walkway hugging the building.

It was far darker here than it'd been at the top — but then, it should be, with two concourses above them the sun was completely blocked now. They didn't happen to be on a concourse level, she could see one above and below, the towers separated with what looked to be an eight meter gap, narrowed somewhat with little walkways here and there, running around the buildings, stitching them together in places. It took her only a second to orient herself, and she was walking off again, slipping through the thin crowd on the tiny walkway.

"Do you even know where you're going?"

She shot a smirk over her shoulder. "Come on, Onasi, don't you trust me?"

And there was that scowl again. His face was getting a fair bit of exercise today. "Trust you? Lady, I don't even know who you are."

Well, that made two of them, she guessed. "You better be nice to me, Flyboy. I might just leave you lost and alone down here."

"Like you wou—" Onasi cut off mid-syllable, blinked down at her. " _Flyboy?"_

The sight of her crooked grin pulled Onasi's lips into a snarl.

They followed another building all the way to the bottom, though it didn't go very far — this one ended on the concourse level just below them. She led them through another building, another, another, descending ever further. Slowly, the environment around them changed. The lighting grew worse, pleasant yellow light meant to simulate the sun substituted with harsh white glowpanels and brilliantly colorful argon lights, twisted into enticing shapes and figures and slogans. Polished wood and gleaming tile and chrome vanished, replaced with dull ferrocrete and durasteel. The air grew warmer, enough sweat started slipping down her back, humidity turning it thick, tangs of pungent organic waste and acrid industrial byproducts scratching at her nose. The people changed, their clothes simpler, dirtier, personal weapons more and more common. When Onasi bumped into a particularly shifty-looking Kadas'sa'Nikto she almost thought a fist fight would break out, barely managed to talk their way out of it.

Also, it turned out she spoke Nikto. She couldn't even summon surprise at this point. Though she was starting to wonder exactly how many languages she had in her head. How many languages could a person learn, anyway? There must be an upper limit somewhere, the human brain only had so many neurons.

After at least an hours' descent, she stepped out of yet another lift — this one rattling a bit, one glowpanel flickering — and took a glance around. The place looked like it'd once been the lobby of an office building of some kind, but it'd obviously gone to seed at some point in the past, likely centuries ago. The walls and floor were granite, pitted and patched, blackened here and there from blaster hits, crumbling furniture and half-disassembled machinery and refuse scattered around. There were people about, likely residents, the majority dressed in mismatched clothes that were little better than rags, walking purposefully through the open space in and out of doors and lifts, avoiding eye contact with each other. A pack of people, armed and armored, were reclined in what looked like the remains of a fountain, laughing and passing around a bottle. Past the foggy transparisteel there was another concourse, she could make out the snarled wrecks of two swoop bikes from here, the grey walls colored with graffiti.

She turned, gave Onasi a little nod. "Much better." The look of dumbfounded disbelief on his face had her chuckling. Which only made him look at her like she was completely insane.

Which, well, he wasn't wrong. She was pretty sure a conviction one's own memories were fake was considered a form of psychosis. And she couldn't even say with certainty that it _wasn't_ psychosis — it wouldn't be unusual for a human women to develop schizophrenia at her age. She didn't _think_ it was, she had enough reason to believe her conviction was correct, but...

Yeah, trying to not think about it.

This concourse was, in a way, both quieter and noisier than the one outside Zelka's. It was certainly dirtier and smellier, she'd expected that, but the odd contrast in sound was throwing her off more. There were fewer people around, the foot traffic so thin as to be practically nonexistent, what people there were going about their business silently, the low chatter that had filled the air on the upper levels absent. But that didn't mean it was completely quiet. Off in the distance, she could hear the clanking whine of swoop bikes, the sound shifting higher and lower as they came and went, occasionally passing just over their heads, the concourse vibrating in time with the engine, a dull pain throbbing above her ear. Some were common people, she could tell, taking advantage of the unregulated traffic lanes to get around quicker, but she started cataloging gang colors and symbols as well.

It was hardly the safest place in the world, in any other situation she might not have risked coming down this low. But they'd been down here for a few minutes now, and she hadn't seen a single Sith uniform yet. The gangs, at least, had no particular reason to target them.

Following Zelka's map, it was a tense fifteen-minute walk, both of them glancing around the shadowy concourse, hands unconsciously hanging over blasters, before they reached the cantina. She didn't go inside, slipped into the building across the street instead. As luck would have it, it happened to be a residential tower. This lobby was smaller and somewhat less trashed than the other, but just as barren. Curiously, the floor was dominated by a huge reproduction of what she was pretty sure was a gang symbol — a starburst of white lines on a deep blue circle. It vaguely reminded her of a color-inverted Bendu Wheel, she couldn't tell if that was intentional or not. This was probably gang territory, the area would be under the protection of whoever's symbol that was.

She paused at the entrance for a moment, mulling it over, before dismissing it with a shrug. Around here, chances were just about everywhere was claimed by one gang or another. This place didn't look like a warzone, at least, it would have to do.

She took them up a couple floors, stepped out into the hall. The thick carpet was stained and burned away in places, the walls scuffed, a few panels in the ceiling cracked or missing. But there weren't any corpses in the hall, the place seemed relatively quiet. Good enough. She walked down the hall, staring at one door, then another, then another, all down the hall, around a corner, another, another, another.

Finally, after walking around for a few minutes, she stopped, frowning at one apartment in particular. There was dust on the receiver, along the handle. She tried to open it, but of course it was locked. The standby light was on, so the lock was definitely powered, but she didn't have the equipment to crack it. Or the skill, honestly. They could just break it down, she guessed, but she'd like to be able to lock the door behind them. She sighed, biting at her lip.

"Oh, are we breaking into people's homes now?"

She rolled her eyes. "Don't get your knickers in twist, Onasi. It's abandoned."

"How the hell do you know that?"

She didn't dignify that with a response. There was no way she was getting through the door, but maybe... She looked up at the ceiling, and there, perfect. "You think you can get me up there?" she said, pointing to the missing ceiling panel.

"Ah..." Onasi looked up, then at her, measuring the distance and her height with his eyes. Or maybe her weight, come to think of it, as low as the ceilings were. "Sure, I think so. Why?"

"I'm gonna go through the ceiling, open the door from the other side. I'd rather not crawl up there myself, it's going to be disgusting, but I don't think you'll fit."

Onasi's eyes widened, and for a short moment he just stared, blinking at her. "Um, okay. You realize you'll probably have to cut your way in."

"That part won't be a problem."

He didn't seem to entirely believe her, but he shrugged it off. In hardly a minute, with a boost from Onasi, she was yanking herself through the hole, slipping into the narrow space above the ceiling. There wasn't very much room at all, she couldn't even get up to her hands and knees — they only kept these sorts of things in to make it easier to get to pipes and lines and vents and such, nobody actually had to go inside. That wasn't even the worst thing, it was dusty as anything, and it smelled _awful_ , excrement and decaying corpses of vermin, she'd barely wriggled a meter in before she already felt a couple bugs crawl onto her arms. Shivering with revulsion, she pushed on anyway, pulling with her hands and shoving with her feet, forcing herself through wires and piping and such inch by inch.

Finally, she felt she'd gone far enough. It took a bit of awkward twisting to get her arm under herself and up her irritating dress, finding Annas's lightsaber. The glow of the thing was blinding, in close quarters and such darkness, but she narrowed her eyes, cut a curving line below her. She had to pass it from hand to hand a couple times, shuffle around a little to get under where she'd been laying, but she thought she almost—

With a shuddering crunch, a circle of ceiling fell out from under her, and she yelped as her head and half her torso fell with it. She flailed, the brilliant blue blade of the lightsaber nearly passing through her head, her skin clawed with fright, and she let go on instinct, the thing immediately shutting off, clattering to the floor under her. She managed to not fall forward, one of her hands finding the edge of the circle. She hung there for a brief moment, breath heavy, heart pounding in her throat.

Okay. That could have gone more smoothly.

Once her pulse had returned to normal, she awkwardly turned herself around, started lowering herself down feet-first. She wasn't tall enough to get all the way down, obviously, but the drop to the floor wasn't too bad. It took a moment fumbling around to find the lightsaber, and she switched it on again, scanned the walls. She found a light switch, filling the room with a harsh white glow. She made her way through the tiny apartment, flicking on lights as she went. The place looked abandoned, layered with dust and empty of any personal touches, even most of the furniture gone.

Eventually, she found the front door. She yanked it open, shot Onasi a grin. "Welcome home, Captain."

His exasperated frown swiftly turned amused. "I see you had fun."

She glared at him, but he just kept smirking. "Yeah, yeah. Get in here. See if you can get the lock to respond to our coms. I'm taking a bloody shower."

* * *

Her face starting to ache from how long she'd been forcing an ingratiating smile, the revulsion roiling in her throat almost painful, she sank into a respectful bow. "I thank you for your generosity, Great One."

The best way to ingratiate oneself to a Hutt, of course, was to flatter them. But that didn't mean she had to like it.

After idly wandering around the area — she was pretty sure that's what "scouting out" meant, she didn't think there was a real difference — she'd returned to the cantina across the concourse, where she and Onasi had agreed to meet before splitting up. It was a seedy little place, but she thought she actually rather liked it. The only illumination was from argon lights, twisted into the logos of various beverages, all of them intoxicating and a few she recognized as poisonous to humans, residual smoke from various inhalants both legal and illegal hanging heavy in the air, the combination turning the place into a colorful haze, the thin light almost a physical presence. Speakers in all directions were blaring what some part of her recognized as _anachuche_ , a percussion-heavy, synthesized dance music overwhelmingly popular throughout much of the Huttese-speaking rim, so loud she vibrated with it, her chest and her head filled with something light and shivering.

If she'd had occasion to predict how she'd feel about a place like this, she'd have expected she would hate it. The fumes on the air scratching at her eyes and throat, the bodies of more beings than she could count — Hutt slave species were over-represented, she noticed, which was curious — pressing in at all sides, the noise almost overwhelming. At the very least, she'd have thought she'd be getting a headache from her barely-healed concussion. But, to her own surprise, it made her feel... It made her feel _alive_. The sheer energy of the place, surrounding her, enveloping her, she was twitching with the urge to move, shivers running all down her back and arms, it took conscious effort to keep herself from grinning.

It was strange. But she thought she liked it.

When they'd been making plans earlier, some part of her had known a cantina like this would be neutral territory — no one gang would have claimed it, and they'd try to keep any violence away by mutual agreement. But, she'd learned, after taking a quick peek around, it _wasn't_ entirely neutral...but in a way sort of was. It'd only taken a muttered question to a passing Klatooinian to confirm the cantina, or at least part of it, functioned as what passed as a local office for the Exchange. She hadn't been able to stop her lip from curling in a scowl. The Exchange... Well, she didn't like the Exchange.

Not that she was entirely sure how she knew _anything_ about an underground spice- and slave-trading cartel slowly spreading across the rim, but by this point she had stopped even being confused when her brain shit happened.

Despite her feelings on the matter, she'd decided to approach the local representative. Surprisingly, a Hutt. They weren't known for tolerating second string. She'd managed to hold her gorge through the conversation, but it was a near thing on a couple points — she'd suggested she might be looking for work, and she was _very_ much aware what "acquisitions" was supposed to mean.

For a moment, the realization that slavery existed on Taris had filled her with an throat-clenching, frigid rage she couldn't quite explain. The practice was horrid, of course, but...

In the end, she'd gotten little useful information from the Hutt. (He'd only been willing to tell her so much without compensation.) There was currently a gang war going on in the area, the biggest fishes in the sea the Black Vulkars and the Hidden Beks. The latter rang a very dull bell of recognition in her head, but she couldn't place the name. By the sound of it, the Black Vulkars were likely to emerge victorious in time.

And by the way the Hutt praised their leader as a _reasonable_ , _pragmatic_ sort of person, she got the feeling that was unfortunate.

Other than that, nothing was really news. Darth Malak himself was in orbit, come to chastise the local governor, which she'd already known. A Republic fleet had been crushed, Sith soldiers sweeping the lower levels for survivors, yes, yes. The increased Sith presence down here had only kicked up the violence, their patrols could hardly get anywhere before they were torn apart by swoop gangs or even random Tarisian citizens. (Taris had joined the Sith voluntarily, but the decision was still very controversial.) She might have guessed that would happen, but it was actually good news: it was likely the Sith hadn't managed to find Bastila.

Of course, that didn't mean the smug little chit was still alive down here. Even if she'd survived the crash itself, there were still the gangs and the Exchange and the environment itself to contend with. She was a Jedi, but even Jedi could get unlucky.

There didn't seem to be anything else the Hutt was willing to tell her. With a few last disgusting pleasantries, she turned around to step back into the central taproom. Wandering, searching for either Onasi or an empty table, she felt her eyes drift toward the game tables. It'd occurred to her, they would be needing money. They were seriously under-equipped for the task at hand. Not to mention somehow getting two of the most recognizable Republic war heroes off a Sith-controlled planet, that wasn't going to be cheap. Also, well, food, she liked being able to eat. Zelka had been generous, but the handful of credits they had wouldn't carry them very far.

There was a sabaac tournament tomorrow. They had _barely_ enough credits to buy in.

Onasi would take some convincing.

He didn't seem to be here at the moment, so she had at least some time to figure out how exactly she was going to talk him into letting her literally gamble with all their money. Picking a seat along the outside of the circular central room, she slid into a seat, pulled out her datapad, and settled in to wait.

After some time paging through news and information nodes on the holonet, she was startled out of her distraction by a raised voice, cutting over the music from only a table away. "—back off, bug-eyes! Your breath smells like bantha shit."

She blinked, straightened in her seat. Sitting at a table just to her side was a Twi'lek, round bluish face twisted into a dismissive scowl. Where the table didn't obscure her, there were a pair of goggles pushed up on her forehead, by the way the lenses glinted in the light clearly more than simple protection, heavy black synthleather shrouding her shins and her shoulders. Couldn't see her belt from here, but there was a band around her wrist, a glint of metal visible. Spikes and picks, most like. Street kid, petty thief and slicer, was the feeling dropping into her head, but a successful one, the combination of suspicious hardware and rather clean and whole clothes suggested as much.

The odd thing was, the girl was _young_. It could be hard to judge ages with alien species sometimes, but she'd put her around thirteen or so — which, since Twi'leks matured more or less at the same pace humans did, was a bit young to be hanging out in a seedy cantina by herself.

The concerning thing was, two Rodians were flanking her at the table, hovering malevolently over her. Thick synthleather slit and dirty, heavy blasters at their hips, one of them had a nasty burn across the side of his head. Thugs, clearly. She noticed a symbol on one of their sleeves, three black claw marks torn through a red circle — Vulkars.

She reached a hand under the table, slowly, slipped her blaster out of the holster.

"Little girl need lesson in manners!" The Rodian's Huttese was broken, the accent from his native language heavy.

The girl snorted. "That's funny, coming from Vulkar gutter trash."

"Friend and me, maybe we teach—"

"In the middle of Javyar's? Go ahead."

She frowned. The girl was taunting the Vulkars, trying to get them to break the neutrality of the cantina. (Or just mocking them for starting a confrontation somewhere they couldn't finish it, either way.) That suggested she was involved. With what she understood of the area, that meant the girl was probably a Bek. She might have to reconsider her feeling the Beks were less scummy than the Vulkars — she doubted she would see eye to eye with any gang leader who thought it acceptable to recruit children.

But she brushed the thought off, moved her blaster over the lip of the table anyway, flicked it on. She doubted the girl was a totally innocent party, but she was still a child. She wouldn't just sit back and do nothing. It wasn't in her.

Apparently.

She needn't have worried. Just as things looked to be a step away from violence, one of the Rodians even reaching for his blaster, a towering mass of shaggy auburn fur collapsed into a seat at the table, a food-laden tray falling with a clatter. She twitched — was that a _Wookiee_? She hadn't thought Wookiees ever left Kashyyyk.

...Had she ever even heard of Wookiees _at all_? Until a datacard's worth of knowledge of their culture suddenly dropped into her head a couple seconds ago, she hadn't even known they existed.

This brain damage thing was really starting to get old.

"Eating _again_ , Zee? Honestly, we had lunch just a couple hours ago."

The Wookiee opened his mouth, letting out an odd howl of broad vowels broken with uvular and glottal fricatives and trills. She wasn't at all surprised to find she understood every word. "You're much littler than me, Sister."

She blinked. _Sister_. Eyes flicking to the Twi'lek girl, she nodded to herself. Wookiee honor family. Right. Curious he was acknowledging someone of a different species, but fine.

"Oh, sure, just go and throw that in my face."

"Our problem not with Wookiee!" The Rodians had jumped harder than she had at the much larger being showing up, backed off the table a few steps. But she noticed their hands were still hovering near their blasters.

The look of affectionate exasperation vanished from the girl's face as she turned back to the Rodians, scowling again. "You got a problem with me, you got a problem with Big Zee here. Ain't that right?"

"I'm trying to eat. I can threaten red-sun-slime for you later."

Zee might not be trying, but apparently to those who didn't understand it Shyriiwook was threatening enough on its own. Practically shaking in their boots, one of the Rodians squeaking something about this not being over, and the both of them fled, heading straight for the doors out to the concourse.

Shaking her head to herself, she switched the blaster off, started returning it to its holster. But she'd moved too slowly — the girl saw it. A frown crossed her face, head cocking a bit to the side, lekku twitching with curiosity. She leaned closer to the Wookiee, muttered something too quiet to hear from here, getting a grunt in return. Then the girl stood.

A brilliant grin on her face, the girl walked toward her table, her swagger almost impressive given she didn't really have the hips for it yet. Before she could hardly blink, the girl was seated across from her, an energetic, friendly sort of light in her eyes. "Hi! I haven't seen you around before. You new around here?" The girl had the high, thin voice of someone still half a child, bright with eagerness she could almost taste.

She blinked. A quick glance around, but it didn't look like Onasi was here yet. Eh, fuck it. "You could say that."

"Well, just consider me and Zaalbar the welcome committee!" The girl frowned, glanced over her shoulder. "Uh, just me, I guess. Zee is pretty serious about his food."

"No kidding." This Zaalbar had a plate of...something reconstituted, couldn't even guess from here, but his head was bowed halfway to the table, sucking down his meal with hardly any pause for breath. Table manners were something of a foreign concept to Wookiees. Casting the thought off, she turned back to the girl. "He's Zaalbar, and you are...?"

"Oh, sorry. It's Mission, Mission Vao." The girl paused a second, seemingly just to grin at her for a second. "I saw you pulling a blaster on that slime-face's back, you know. I didn't need the help, but thanks for the backup anyway."

"No problem." She nearly said something about how she couldn't do nothing when a couple thugs were picking on a little girl, but she had the feeling that would be taken the wrong way. "I was about two seconds from shooting the bloke, actually. That might have gotten a little awkward."

The girl paused for a moment, mouthing _bloke_ to herself. Her accent would sound a little weird to someone from out here. "You talk funny. Where are you from, anyway?"

"Shelkonwa. It's an Alderaanian colony." Even as she said it, she felt herself frowning. Now that she thought about it, she didn't think her accent sounded particularly Alderaanian. It was hard to tell for sure — on top of the difficulty in picking apart her own accent while she was speaking, the dialects of the human core were rather homogenous to begin with. She didn't centralize her unaccented vowels the way most speakers of Basic did, or at least not quite as much. And how she tended to monophthongize or break more complex vowels, and spirantize affricates... If she had to guess, she'd peg it for something on the Alsakani–Shawken axis.

Which still left her with dozens of possibilities for her homeworld. But she was starting to wonder if she'd ever even been on Shelkonwa before. She _remembered_ Shelkonwa, of course, she'd lived there for half her life, but...

She shook the thought off. She didn't want to think about that.

"Alderaan, huh. I hear it's pretty there." There was a faint note of skepticism on Mission's voice, as though someone had told her about forests and mountains and rivers before, and she couldn't entirely believe such things existed, especially on a world as old as Alderaan. She must have grown up here.

"It is, I guess. Such things are a matter of personal opinion." Herself, she'd never felt the awe so many people seemed to get from certain examples of the natural world. It was nice, she guessed, but it was just...there. Of course, she didn't have a high opinion of visual art either. Not what she preferred to use her eyes for. "How about you? You're obviously not from Ryloth."

Mission frowned at her. "How can you tell?"

"Your accent's wrong. The local Basic is your first language."

"You can tell that just listening to someone? Far out." Mission paused for a moment, her head tipping to the side again, sending one of her lekku sliding against her shoulder. "You don't really seem the type. To be hanging around here, I mean."

She felt a wry smile twitching at her lips. "You could say I've had a significant change in fortunes recently."

A curious look crossed Mission's face, but she didn't voice whatever she was thinking. "Well, if you ever need help finding your way around, just give me a call. You got a com?"

Without a thought, she dug out her com, and swapped codes with the strangely friendly little girl. Which might be a mistake, she realized, when her brain started up again. They weren't going to be here long, and she hardly knew the girl, and... Well, it generally wasn't wise to give a stranger who obviously dabbled in slicing a direct link into a wirelessly broadcasting bit of tech you carried with you everywhere. It was a basic security precaution to keep com codes private, in fact, one of those rules _everyone_ knew. But she'd done it anyway, without pausing to think.

She couldn't explain it. It'd just... It'd seemed like the right thing to do.

Shaking off the tingles along her arms, the vague feeling of unease, she shot Mission a teasing smile. "I'm to take it you know the area like the back of your hand, then."

The girl's face broke into a grin again. "No doubt! Me and Zee have been here forever, we know everyone around here. If you need to find anything or anyone, I know where it is — and how to get there without some slimeface blowing your head off. Though, if you're _really_ new you should probably talk to Gadon. He can set you up with a place to stay, find you some work if you like."

"Who's Gadon?"

"You really are new, everyone knows who Gadon Thek is. He leads the Hidden Beks."

There was another odd sense of familiarity, that she'd heard the name before, but she still couldn't place it. Since she'd had a similar moment with the Beks a while ago, it was probably even the same Gadon Thek. "No, I'm fine, I don't need a place to stay." Explaining she'd broken into an apartment in a building under Bek protection would be a bad idea. "How does someone like you wind up falling in with a swoop gang anyway?" By _someone like you_ , she was referring to her age, but she was trying to avoid drawing attention to that. She'd seen the way Mission had scowled when the thugs had called her _little girl_.

By the brightness of Mission's smile, she didn't notice the subtext. "Oh, I've been with the Beks forever. The gangs aren't all the same, you know." Or, maybe she _had_ caught the subtext, just the _swoop gangs are bad_ part instead. "It's Vulkars going around shooting anyone who looks at them funny like psychos, not the Beks. Gadon's a good man, he looks out for people."

She made a mental note to not speak ill of Gadon and the Beks too directly. It sounded like Mission had practically been raised by them. Though, that the girl was biased didn't necessarily mean she was wrong — it wasn't unusual, in places like this where government power broke down somewhat, for the common citizenry to fill the vacuum. Sometimes, the gangs that took over were violent, corrupt thugs, but others provided for and protected their people when the state couldn't or wouldn't. The former were more common than the latter, but the latter still happened.

Of course, she wasn't taking it for granted the Beks were the latter kind just because some random teenager thought well of them, but she'd keep an open mind, at least.

For some minutes, they just talked. Or, if she were being honest, Mission interrogated her about whatever came to mind. What planets she'd been to before, what they were like, what the people there were like, what exactly did linguistics professors do with their time, what even was _linguistics_ , did she follow swoop racing at all, on and on and on. She shouldn't really be doing this, she should be avoiding any sort of personal interactions with locals, but...

Stang, she just couldn't help it. The kid was just so precious. Such a cocky little shit, with a blaster on one hip and weighed down with who knew what illicit equipment, talking casually about poverty and sickness and repression and violence, but always smiling, a light in her eyes she couldn't help but find...

It was nice. Somehow, despite not being able to remember, she'd known it'd been a long, _long_ time since she'd been around anyone so...so _happy_.

She shouldn't encourage the girl, but she just couldn't help herself.

So, of course, Onasi had to show up and ruin it.

She and Mission had been talking for some time, she hadn't been keeping track, when he came walking up to the table. Through the rainbow haze of the cantina, it took her a moment to recognize him. "You have me wandering around a slum one misstep away from open war, and here you are chatting up some kid?"

The shift in Mission's face from grin to scowl was so quick it was almost impressive. "Watch who you're calling _kid_ , you withered old geezer!"

Her eyes drifting closed for a second, she let out a thin sigh. She knew, instantly, there was no way these two would ever get along. "Mind giving us the table, Mission? I have some business to discuss with my friend here."

Mission gave her a skeptical look, as though she couldn't quite believe her new friend, who'd she'd only known for an hour, could really be friends with this arseface, who she'd only known for a couple seconds. She shrugged. "Sure thing, Cina. We should be checking in with Zaerdra about now anyway. Give me a call sometime." The girl popped up to her feet, something hidden in her belt clinking a bit. "Come on, Zee, let's go." And the two were off, banter about mealtimes and portion sizes quickly fading as they wandered away.

Onasi sank heavily into the seat she'd vacated, shooting a suspicious glance at their retreating backs. She couldn't help the feeling she'd just traded down, so far as conversational partners went, but she wasn't exactly in a position to be choosy about the company she kept. "Did you actually do any recon, or did you just sit in the cantina drinking and chatting up the locals?"

She sniffed — he should be glad she hadn't been drinking, she'd nearly gone up to the bar to order something. The only thing that had stopped her was the half-faded knowledge that alcohol and head trauma didn't mix. She brought her datapad out of stand-by, in a few seconds had her annotated map of the area transmitted to Onasi. "It's not my fault you're slow, Flyboy. I got here over an hour ago, questioned the Hutt over there for a while before Mission got friendly. Did you know the Exchange are big on Taris? They operate out in the open, even, agents in bloody cantinas."

Partway through sending his own map, Onasi twitched, glanced around the cantina, a sudden razor of concern about him. "I heard some thug named Davik runs the syndicate around here, but I didn't realize it was so bad. They own the cantina? _This_ cantina?"

"I don't know if they own it, but they certainly use it as a contact and recruiting point." Her lips turned up in a dark smile. "Zax was quite open about asking if I wanted to collect bounties for the Exchange."

The glare on Onasi's face was so cold it could freeze a blaster shot in midair. "You told him no, of course."

"Of course. I have no intention of running errands for a cartel of slavers and murderers." Hot annoyance flared in her chest at his look of relief — honestly, who did he think she was? "I did manage to get some information out of him, but it's not good news. This planet is swimming with Sith, swoop gangs, and the fucking _Exchange_. It's unlikely we'll find Shan first."

"Maybe she'll be the one finding us."

She fought the urge to roll her eyes and completely failed. The confidence some people had in Jedi was just so absurd. They were mortal beings like everyone else. "If the Sith captured or killed her, they'd be bragging about it on the net. Since they haven't, and seeing as she didn't show up at Zelka's, her pod must have fallen rather further into the city than ours did. Who knows how many buildings and walkways and such it hit on the way down? Shan would have been rattled around in there something awful, I wouldn't be surprised if she's hurt nearly as badly as I was. If someone stumbled across her while she was still out of it..." She shrugged. "Even Jedi can get unlucky."

Onasi winced, a hand rising to rub at the side of his face. Apparently, the same thought had occurred to him, but he'd been in denial.

"This isn't going to be an easy job, Onasi. Someone is going to get to her before we do. We need to find out who, then we need to break her out. That's going to require contacts, and guns. Lots of guns. Possibly mercs, if we can afford them. But we can't afford them. We can't afford any of this. Just feeding ourselves will see us drained of cash inside the week."

"Yeah, I know." The frustration on his voice was clear, and for a second despair fell over him, face closing up as he slumped into himself. But it lasted only a second before he rallied, straightening in his chair, shoulders back and firm, eyes glinting with determination. And there he went being handsome again, that was really quite annoying. "I don't suppose any money-making opportunities jumped out at you while you were looking around?"

She felt the smirk spread across her face.

"I'm going to hate this idea, aren't I?"

She didn't answer. She just smirked all the wider.

* * *

Argon lights — _Throwing a curveball at you, like I do. Making this more difficult than I have to, I know, but I'm not certain it would make sense for people in the Star Wars universe to use the same name for the same technology. The name we use is an artifact of our history — we happened to popularize the technology using neon first, but there are all sorts of gasses that work just as well. In fact, neon isn't even the best option, from a practical standpoint. Argon might take more energy to ionize than neon but, while neon is abundant in space, it's a very thin, light gas, light enough most of Earth's neon floated off eons ago. Argon, which is used in purple and blue "neon" lights, is roughly 519 TIMES more abundant in our atmosphere, coming in at just under one percent._

 _Presumably, the atmosphere of any planet with biospheres similar to ours would also have atmospheric argon. Earth-native life requires potassium — it's essential for proper cell function, making up about .2% of the human body — and a small percentage of potassium comes in a radioactive isotope, which happens to decay into argon. By comparing the isotopes present on Earth, it's clear the_ _ **vast**_ _majority was produced by potassium decaying over millions of years (over 99% of it, in fact). Thus, we can assume any life that is chemically anything like ours would have evolved on a world with significant amounts of argon in the atmosphere. Not only is it likely pre-spaceflight humans would have discovered argon gas-discharge lighting, but virtually every other intelligent species should have as well. It's less likely, I feel, that the use of neon in lighting would be nearly as universal._

 _In the modern day, I wouldn't be surprised if most of their "argon" lights actually use synthesized krypton — it's (theoretically) easily produced with the level of tech available in Star Wars, and glows a plain white, so you just have to tint/paint the glass to easily get whatever color you want. But I'd expect them to still be called argon lights for historical reasons. Of course, it is a bit of a stretch to assume they'd still be using cold cathode gas-discharge lighting after thousands of years, but it is simple to build and comparatively efficient. People use what works._

 _Yeah, I know. Can't help myself._

[smells like bantha shit] — _If anyone's wondering, I know "poodoo" literally means_ fodder _. Cianen translates for intent, so_ shit _is a better fit._

[she'd put her around thirteen or so] — _Mission's canon age at the beginning of KotOR is actually fourteen. The art director has said the model for her face was a mistake, she looks too old._

[Had she _ever_ even heard of Wookiees _at all_?] — _KotOR happens not long after Kashyyyk was discovered by the wider galaxy. It's quite likely the vast majority have never heard of Kashyyyk or Wookiees before._


	6. Taris — II

"What the hell is that?"

She gave Onasi an unimpressed look over her drink, his form blurred slightly by the thin haze lifting from the surface. " _Mashutso, yan-telazhi._ "

A flash of irritation crossed his face. "You know, not everyone speaks every language in the kriffing galaxy."

"Honestly, Onasi, it's just Huttese." She took a sip, the heat of it rising in her cheeks, the spiced fruitiness seeming to shoot a giddy sort of energy straight into her veins. "And there aren't words in Basic for _mashutso_ and _telache_ anyway. It's Hutt alcohol, basically, but with the _telache_ , an impurity, filtered out. It's poisonous to most other species, you see."

"Alcohol? So it gets you drunk?"

She shrugged. "Sort of. I'd describe _mashutso_ intoxication as somewhere between alcohol and gree spice, actually. But yeah." Momentarily, she wondered to herself how exactly she knew what the high from any sort of spice at all felt like. Eh.

It took Onasi a moment to regain the self-control to speak — or, at least, to speak without screaming at her in the middle of the cantina. She took another sip as she watched him gritting his teeth, smiling at him with all the innocence she could muster (which surely wasn't much). Finally, he ground out, "Is this _really_ the time?"

A smirk twisting her lips, she said, "I can't think of a more appropriate time, really."

She probably shouldn't find the way Onasi grimaced and cursed under his breath quite so funny.

Javyar's Cantina and Gameroom was a significantly different place than they'd found it yesterday, almost unrecognizable. Flatscreens had been hung on the walls, flashing the number of open seats, tournament rules, advertisements from sponsors and the like. All the furniture orbiting the bar had been replaced, the main room instead filled with a dozen and a half holographic sabaac tables. Instead of the usual patrons, a seedy crowd composed evenly of washed-out destitutes and bristling thugs, there were dozens of participants and a few hangers-on milling about the space, drinking, chatting, brooding. They were a curious lot, representing a variety of species and classes — she saw one two-headed being she didn't recognize at all, their dress running from rags to armor to fine silk to the leathers and brilliantly dyed synthweaves of professional players.

She'd been a bit surprised, some minutes ago, when she'd recognized Mission, complete with Zaalbar looming over her shoulder, furry shoulders slumped and arms petulantly folded. The girl had an ID badge and everything. Apparently, she was playing.

She wasn't sure she liked the look of the eager smirk on Mission's face. But it really wasn't her business.

They'd gotten here about a half hour early, had maybe another five minutes until the tables were set and they could get down to it. She hadn't bothered trying to scope out the competition — there were too many of them, a hundred at least, and she'd only be playing a small fraction of them. But she'd gotten bored of waiting, and Onasi hadn't let up with his impersonation of one of Cianen's more frustrating uncles. Hence, drink.

With the way the stuff metabolized, it hardly took long at all. The first few sips were already hitting her system. Not a lot, not enough to incapacitate her, it didn't dull her senses — if anything it made her sharper. It came as a sense of eagerness, of _possibility_ , an irresistible energy that set her foot to tapping, her face to smirking. "Relax, Flyboy. I know what I'm doing."

He frowned at her, unease clear in his eyes. " _Do_ you?"

On instinct, she opened her mouth to answer, something about _obviously_ she did, this was her they were talking about. Then she stopped, considered it for a second. This was rather outside of her experience — Cianen had played a little sabacc with friends just for fun, but certainly nothing like this — but going about this sabaac tournament credit-making scheme of hers she'd been possessed with an unshakeable sense of confidence she couldn't explain. She'd just been rolling with it, honestly. "It appears I do, yes."

That didn't reassure him at all, of course.

They spent the next few minutes in uncomfortable silence, on his end at least. He sat there pouting, glaring at her now and again, while she sat apart, watching the crowd and slowly sipping at her drink. By the time the tables were finally announced, he gave up, said he would be in one of the showrooms until it was over. He clearly expected her to be eliminated quickly, throwing away what little money they had. Which was really quite silly of him, he'd been there when she'd cleaned out all his pilots, again and again and again.

All of them excluding Ferlip, anyway. She _would_ say he had a _nenthar_ 's own luck, if he weren't floating in a bacta tank back at Zelka's, deep in a coma he'd likely never wake from. Cast a shadow on the thought, that.

Before long, she found herself sitting with seven other beings, plus an Exchange employee serving as dealer. (She mostly managed to not scowl at the sight of the sunburst-and-dagger insignia on his lapel.) The table flickered into life, play areas demarcated with glowing lines, a colorful illusion of chips appearing before each of them. The dealer gave a threatening grumble about following the fucking rules or else, a small ante was drawn from all of them, and the game started.

Resisting the urge to glare at the dealer, she rearranged her cards so one was atop the other, instead of randomly splayed across her section of the table — there was really no reason to throw them around like that. She bent the near, narrow end of the flexiscan cards up, just enough to make out the numbers before dropping them again. Seven of flasks and the Wheel, for a balance of three pos. This hand was going to be awkward.

The betting went around once, after a second of waffling she decided to fork over the fifty creds needed to stay in, despite her doubts about her hand. At this early stage, it didn't really matter that much. The dealer threw out another round of cards, she slipped it to the top of her stack before tipping up a corner. Six of staves.

Hmm.

She looked out at the table, taking in the cards other people were locking, and barely held back a snort. A human woman halfway around the table had locked in an Idiot, the Ithorian across from her had Void and a seven of sabers — she had no idea what the woman was thinking, and it looked like the Ithorian, locked in at twenty-five neg, was hoping to draw or shift up into a win. And they were the first two to lock, the rest were still thinking.

She hadn't realized there would be bloody amateurs in this tournament.

Locking in the Wheel and the six, she sat through the round of betting, participated only so much as she needed to to stay in. She was slightly surprised when the Nikto next to her folded. Before the first shift, even. Okay. As soon as the betting was over, the table flashed, signaling the shift.

Once it was over, she tipped up the corner of her card — and held back a wince. Master of sabers. That didn't help her at all. When it came to her turn to ask for another card, she waved the dealer off. She didn't miss the flicker on a couple faces, a rather seedy-looking Devaronian to her right, the Fool woman. She let herself smirk.

When the betting came around, two men who were obviously gang members glaring as they bet and raised, she raised for the first time in the hand. Not a lot, but some, bringing the round up to three-fifty. The Fool woman folded flat out at that, but the rest stayed in, despite the clear hesitation stalling the Devaronian's fingers for a couple seconds. Then came another locking phase.

The Fool woman glared when she didn't lock anything in. She smirked again.

The shift hit again, she tipped up the corner of her card. Six of coins, putting her at twenty-two pos. Perfect. But she kept the satisfaction off her face, narrowed her eyes just for a second before relaxing again.

The best strategy, of course, was to make yourself as expressionless as possible. Faking tells was all well and good for the first few hands, but eventually the others would catch on, it only worked for so long. Well, no, the _best_ strategy was to find some way to taunt a few people on the table if you could, try to get them angry. Angry people were stupid people. But, yes, faking tells didn't work past the first few hands, but it _did_ work the first few hands, so it was still useful.

And the Devaronian jumped on it like an idiot, immediately betting five hundred. Which, as small as the buy-in was, meant anyone calling would have sunk half their creds on the first hand. Most of the table realized that, all of them except the Ithorian folded. Still didn't know what he (she?) was thinking, but okay. It was only the three of them in now, actually.

Instead of taking another card, she threw down her last one, locking herself in. Half the table glared at her. She just smiled back, sipping at her mashutso. They both stayed in through the next shift, but the Devaronian ended up way over, his last draw still putting him at twenty-six pos, and the Ithorian managed to draw up to twenty neg.

In a few minutes, she'd just managed to — she glanced at the count next to her illusory chips — a little less than double their money. Even after the house took their share, she was up a thousand credits. And Onasi had been so insistent this was a terrible idea.

If she knew where the cameras were, she'd be smirking at them right now.

The rest of the game went more or less along the same lines. There were a few hands she took a hit on. She'd always stay in until at least the first shift, but sometimes it went badly enough she decided to fold instead of sink more money into a questionable hand. It didn't really matter though, her wins were more than making up for a few minor losses here and there. The other players were bankrupted one by one, until there were only two of them left.

This tournament was rather peculiar in that, once a table had been reduced to two players, they played against each other, but both were automatically all-in. So, really, they weren't playing against each other so much as they were playing against the shift. For a moment, she thought she was going to overdraw, and lose the first round — not that it mattered, she had _far_ more credits than he did, she'd have another chance. But, at the last moment, in a shift even she would call simple luck, her nine of coins became the Queen of Air and Darkness, and she had twenty-three. And that was that.

See, Onasi? A single game of sabaac and she'd already multiplied their money by seven. Of course, it wasn't money she got to _keep_ , it stayed in the tournament, but that was only two more games. Even if she just made it to the last table, only needed to win one measly little game, she would still make them tens of thousands of credits. And since Taris was apparently short on decent sabaac players, that shouldn't even be hard.

Maybe he should just listen to her next time.

* * *

Giving the girl a hard look across the table, she set down the Mortifying and the ace of sabers, transforming her pathetic eight pos into a perfect twenty-three neg. Mission's bright grin flickered, a shade of annoyance creasing the smooth, deep blue skin of her forehead.

Mission had no right at all to be annoyed. She was cheating.

It'd taken her a while to figure out what was going on. Meeting Mission at the final table was a bit of a surprise, and there had been a dark cast to her smirk that had immediately set her on edge. Most of the time, it was subtle, she took care to not advertise it. Whatever slice she'd done was very minimal. She smoothly sailed into hands in the twenties more frequently than was statistically likely, but sometimes it just worked out like that. A few hands, when Mission narrowly edged someone out by a point, she'd be struck with this odd... She wasn't certain how to describe it, really. Like eyes on the back her head, her spine tingling, an electricity in the air she couldn't explain.

Of course, Mission had to remove all doubt when she shifted herself into an Idiot's Array. That _could_ have been explained by simple luck — if she hadn't given another player, who'd managed to get a twenty-three on the deal, a tauntingly smug little smirk.

The kid might be skilled enough to slice the table, but she wasn't mature enough to hide it very well.

Once she'd figured out what was happening, she'd only stayed in hands she thought could easily put her above twenty, folding out of mediocre hands she might have run with otherwise. It'd kept her in this long. She had won this hand, just barely, sealing the fate of a human man with garish taste in clothes — probably thought himself rakish, but honestly he just hurt to look at. With a dramatic, good-natured sigh, the man stood, leaving just the two of them.

Which meant she'd be playing against the shift with a cheater. And Mission had more credits than her.

She was going to lose on the next hand.

Practically speaking, that wasn't too big of a deal. She'd made it to second place at least, which guaranteed her a quarter million credits. (And that was _after_ the house's cut, she'd checked the fine print.) But she might have gotten half a mil instead if this cheeky little shit weren't cheating.

It was quite frustrating, but she was trying to not let it bother her.

The room was empty at this point, just her, Mission, Zaalbar looming behind her, and the dealer, the audience and the eliminated players relegated to the various showrooms and bars scattered across the five levels of this tower run by the cantina. In almost eerie silence, the stone-faced Exchange grunt passed out four cards and then another two, all face-up, starting what would probably be the last hand of the tournament.

She openly frowned at her hand in front of her. Endurance, three of staves, nine of flasks — which could be two pos or fourteen neg. A glance up showed the girl was locking in the master of flasks and the Queen of Air and Darkness, holding back her ten of staves to be shifted out, putting her at twelve/sixteen neg. She was obviously aiming for a negative hand, using the Queen to give her a bit of wiggle room. (Despite its low point value, the Queen was a very valuable card for just that reason.)

She had to assume Mission would cheat herself into a twenty-two or twenty-three neg. The smartest thing to do, then, was to aim for a positive hand. Her hand wasn't perfect for it but, if she were lucky, she could win outright or at least force a split. The table was stacked against her, but she could try, at least. She locked in Endurance and the three, held back the nine.

Mission's third card was shifted into a ten of sabers — with a bright grin, Mission immediately pushed the card forward, locking in at twenty-two neg.

Her own card shifted into...into Justice. She blinked, glanced between their hands for a second, probability figures running through her head. Then she slid Justice forward, locking in at 6/22 pos. She beckoned the dealer with a finger, not breaking eye contact with Mission. "Card, please."

Mission's grin flickered, her eyes narrowing. The same math she'd figured was surely running through the girl's head. With Mission at twenty-neg, she needed twenty-three to win — if she figured the house rules correctly, if she tied with one more card, but also one more face card, they'd split the pot and go again. Twenty-three neg was too far away to get with a single card, so she needed twenty-two or twenty-three pos.

But, the trick was, like the Queen, Endurance could be either positive or negative, at the player's choice. If it were positive, she would win with the Idiot or the Word or a one of coins or staves. If it were negative, she would tie with Temperance or a master of coins or staves, and win with an ace of coins or staves. None of those cards were in use, all nine options were in play. Not only was she drawing a new card, but there were two more shifts she could use as well. That meant she had three chances to get it.

Assuming she'd done the math in her head correctly, she had about a one in four chance of at least staying in for another hand. Twenty-one out of seventy-six, yes, that was about a quarter.

The dealer set down her new card. Five of flasks, no good. "Shift."

As the dealer moved to key the shift, Mission brought her hands together, one thumb rubbing at the center of her palm. The fingers, though, slipped a little into her sleeve.

She glared at the girl, who looked to be trying to hold in a smirk.

The shift gave her a four of staves. She didn't expect it to do any good, with this cocky little shit cheating, but she called for the last shift anyway. The Star.

And that was that, she'd lost.

The flatscreens were blaring something or another, one of the hosts blabbing off, a few patrons already starting to sweep into the main room, but she ignored all that. Before she'd even made it to her feet, Mission had sprung up, wrapping her arms around her Wookiee friend and giggling. Zaalbar's face was pinched a little with exasperation, but there was still warmth there, sparkling in his dark eyes. He even picked her up and spun her around a couple times, roaring congratulations in her ears, Mission's ecstatic screeching bouncing off the walls.

She couldn't help smiling a little at the sight. Of course, if she hadn't come away with a quarter mil, multiplying their credits by a factor of a hundred in a single day, it might have been a different story. She might have been too annoyed to enjoy the sight of their innocent, adolescent happiness. _Innocent_ might not be quite the right word, but she still found them oddly...precious, she guessed.

Before whatever had happened to her, she _really_ must not have been around happy people very much.

She would definitely have to rub Onasi's nose in this, though. He'd been _so convinced_ she would ruin everything. A quarter mil should be more than enough to equip themselves however they needed, possibly even bribe their way off the planet. They were all set, and she hadn't even needed to commit any misdemeanors along the way.

She wondered if she could get Onasi to punch her in her own smug face. Probably not, he did seem like the never-hit-a-woman type...

Eventually, Mission and Zaalbar were done celebrating, the girl still glowing with a brilliant grin. Before the tournament officials could make their way over, start the process of handing out everyone's winnings, she slid up to them. "Nice playing, Mission."

The girl stalled a moment, blinking at her hand once or twice before taking it. "Thanks, Cina, you too. No hard feelings, right?"

"Of course." She clenched tighter on Mission's hand, jerked down and back. The girl stumbled forward a step with a low yelp, putting their faces next to each other's, her nose a shade away from the girl's _tchin_...which was apparently what right-side lekku were called in Ryl, she hadn't known she knew that. Muttering low under her breath, "Maybe you should be more careful doing that in future." She clasped Mission's shoulder for a moment, emulating the gesture common in many human cultures for their audience. "Someone might take it rather more personally than I am." Then she let go, backed off a step, smiling back at the girl as though nothing were amiss.

A little bit of the light had gone out of Mission's smile, looking a little shaken, her lekku twitching just noticeably. Apparently, she hadn't expected to be caught. She nodded, one hand flicking under her chin, across her chest. _Thanks, I'll be careful._

She blinked. She knew Republic Standard Sign Language. Huh.

Wait, forget her own absurd language abilities for a second, how exactly did some random Twi'leki teenager in lower city Taris pick up RSL anyway? That was—

On, no, never mind. There were plenty of alien species who had just as much trouble distinguishing the sounds in Basic listening to it, just as there were plenty who were biologically incapable of speaking it — RSL was often used by diverse communities in the Republic, usually alongside spoken Basic. (There were even a number of standard workarounds for species with unusual hand morphologies, it was a whole thing.) Not to mention, in poorer communities like this one medical interventions for deafness would be less accessible than they were elsewhere. It actually made perfect sense.

Cianen _had_ taken a course on signing subcultures in the Republic back when she was an undergraduate. Which was how she knew all that. She'd never actually studied _using_ it, though, that was still new.

Or, old, technically, when she thought about it.

— _much you can learn about a people from their language—_

— _not the point, when it—_

— _aggressive, I know, but—_

— _ence of who they are far outweighs—_

A warm, dull pain swam into existence, just above and in front of her ear. She shook her head to herself, the cantina swirling around her, just for a second before everything snapped back into clarity, the pain fading away. She'd decided thinking too directly about her brain stuff was a bad idea. Right.

* * *

 _His sense of her on the Force was undeniable. Lesami was and always had been one of those people who were simply impossible to miss. He wondered, sometimes, how it was the Jedi had found her so late. Folded within the fabric of life around him, she was a wellspring of power that could not be ignored. A burner hot to the touch, a light the eyes stung to look at._

 _It was one on the list of reasons the Masters were so hard on her. She made the Masters nervous. Alek thought he'd noticed before even Lesami had._

 _Really, with how she burned in the Force, it hadn't been hard to track her down at all. He simply wished he'd found her somewhere else. Opening his eyes showed him the same scene that'd been before him when he'd closed them — the noise and squalor of the lower city, the impoverished, lawless depths of Coruscant cast into almost cartoonish color by hundreds of argon lights, rainbow light and shadow. The concourse was crowded, the few people taking notice of him looking at his robes, the lightsaber at his waist with open mistrust and contempt, hostility rising in black spikes all around him._

 _And Lesami was right in front of him, only a dozen or so meters away. In an establishment advertising itself as a gameroom and bar. His impression of her light and sharp and, and..._

 _..._ happy _wasn't quite the right word. He recognized the feeling, yes, it was that same smug contentment that thrummed out of her through the Force whenever she solved some puzzle or another, bested someone in a duel, pulled off some new feat of semi-illicit sorcery —_ why _Master Kreia was teaching her that stuff he'd never understand._

 _Alek had the very uncomfortable feeling that Lesami had snuck down to the lower city to play sabaac. And she was winning._

 _He took in a long breath, the air tainted with the acrid and sweet mix of industrial pollution and rotting garbage, then let it out in a long, tolerant sigh. Shuffling his uneasiness into the back of his head, Alek walked into the tight shadows of the building._

 _The place was dense with sentients of a dozen species, the air thick with smoke, turned into a multicolored haze by thin argon lighting, the pounding music and conversation in too many languages to pick apart. But through all of it, it was easy to pick out Lesami. Even if she didn't set the Force afire with her very presence, he'd be able to find her._

 _He tried to ignore the way his mouth went dry when he did._

 _Lesami, he knew, tended to avoid presenting herself as a Jedi during her frequent forays outside of the Temple. People treated Jedi differently, she'd said when he'd asked after it. Normal people see Jedi as heroic pseudo-deities, or delusional hermits, or superpowered tyrants, exactly what depended on their personal opinion of the Order. But they always acted different around Jedi, and not in a good way. They were always on their guard, waiting for a miracle or a threat, they could never relax._

 _To be honest, Alek had never really thought of that before. He and Master Zhar had had a long conversation about how Jedi should go about interacting with common people, and he still wasn't sure who was right._

 _He knew Lesami got up to all sorts of things out in the city a Jedi really shouldn't be involving herself in. For the most part, he'd tried to just not think about it. This was the first time he'd taken it upon himself to track her down. So he hadn't expect to find...well,_ this _._

 _Lesami was sitting at one of the sabaac tables, reclining back in her chair, chin propped up on a hand. And she_ certainly _wasn't presenting herself as a Jedi. The hair on one side of her head had been pulled out of her face into a braid, running tight against her skin before drooping down behind her ear, the other side let loose, a nest of curls and spikes, the multicolored lights flashing off black. She'd put something around her eyes, shadows glittering silver every time she blinked, her lips a deep red, he knew her face too well to think that was natural. And she wasn't wearing robes, oh no, shimmersilk in purple and black, he was trying not to look, the dress was too..._

 _Well. By this point he was very familiar with how distracting Lesami could be._

 _The look of her had him frozen in shock for a moment, blinking like a juvenile idiot, before his brain finally kicked into drive again. What the_ hell _was she doing? Honestly, some of the things Lesami did sometimes, he had no idea how she got away with—_

 _Who was he kidding, he knew exactly how she got away with it. He_ should _be wondering why her Master permitted her...eccentricities. He was starting to wonder if Master Kreia wasn't just as crazy as the whispers and subtle looks suggested._

 _But he couldn't just leave her here. He jerked into motion, pushing through the morass of sentients to stand over her. "I suppose I should have expected something like this."_

 _Lesami tipped her head back against her chair, looking straight up at him, her face split with a crooked grin. He tried not to notice the angle down her dress he was getting. "Hello there, Master Jedi. Can I help you with something?" There was something on her voice, something subtle but sharp, he wasn't sure how to read it._

 _He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything there was a harsh groan of breath over his shoulder. Over_ his _shoulder, and Alek was rather tall for a human. In an odd, snappy accent, a deep voice drawled, "Is this Jedi bothering you, Nujae?"_ Nujae? _Alek glanced over the shoulder, nearly took a startled step back at the Herglic looming over him. He was tall even for a Herglic, Alek would have to reach up a fair ways to find his head, his shoulders as wide as Alek's arms outstretched. Peculiarly for a Herglic, mostly known as a gentle people, this one's arms were covered in nicks from blades and burns from near misses, a nasty blaster scar overtaking much of the left side of his face. He was looking at Alek with clear distrust, his wide lips curling._

 _Faintly, he remembered Herglics were one of the species naturally immune to manipulation through the Force. The thought didn't make him feel any less uneasy._

" _It's fine, Joshal, Alek's cool. Hundred."_

 _Alek blinked, turned back down to Lesami. She was focused on the game again, seemingly ignoring him. He didn't miss the tension in her shoulders, how the other beings at the table — Devaronians, Rodians, a bloody Mrlssi of all things — kept throwing him wary glances. "What the hell are you doing here, Lesami?"_

" _Careful there, Master Jedi." Lesami messed around with her cards a little bit, but he didn't know enough about sabaac to tell at a glance what was going on, and didn't truly care besides. "Cursing implies anger. If your master heard that, it might mean another lecture. Zhar Lestin," she said, leaning a little closer to a smirking Devaronian to her left. "A good man, of course, but he never shuts the fuck up, honestly."_

 _A flash of irritation warmed his face, just for an instant, before it was washed away again. "And I suppose Kreia always keeps her thoughts to herself."_

 _At her master's name, Lesami stilled, suddenly cold and hard, her presence in the Force too sharp to look at, the way she only got when she was truly annoyed. "I'm sure I couldn't say."_

" _Dammit, Lesami, stop messing around!" He could hear the anger on his own voice, but he didn't care, Lesami was just— just— "This is no place for a Jedi to be! You're coming back to the Temple with me, right now!"_

 _The room, abruptly, went silent._

 _While the scarred and armed sentients all around the room glared at them, a few at the table already springing to their feet and going for blasters, outrage an instant from breaking, Lesami let out a heavy sigh. "Alek, you're a bloody idiot. You know that?"_

 _There was shouting, accusations of cheating filling the air, plenty of rather graphic invective directed at the Jedi in general, and blasters were appearing in all directions, he could feel it on the air, they weren't letting Lesami out with whatever money she'd won. Or perhaps at all. Without thinking, an automatic response to the hostility all around them, Alek reached for his lightsaber. The movement had the more jumpy among them firing, and his eyes were dazzled with blasterfire. Even as the Force moved his arm to intercept the first shots, he abruptly realized that, with the way she was dressed, Lesami most likely didn't have her lightsaber on her._

 _But then, she didn't really need one._

 _Lesami had sprung to her feet at his side, one arm rising as the bolts fell upon them. A few of the first volley struck her directly, the fabric of her dress incinerating on contact, but she wasn't harmed. Alek could feel it, the Force burned with it, too bright, he took an unconscious step away, she was pulling the energy of the blaster shots into herself, consuming it, changing it. She slammed her hand down on the table, and the energy was released as a gout of fire, a green and blue wave roaring up toward the ceiling, white lightning crackling across the surface. When the display died down, the table had been reduced to a cracked and smoking ruin._

 _And the room had fallen silent again, the thugs all around them frozen with fearful awe. Or, perhaps, the simple realization that blasters were worse than useless against a Jedi like Lesami. She_ could _be overwhelmed, of course, she could only channel so much energy at once, but they probably didn't know that._

 _The Order might have removed most forms of sorcery from the standard curriculum millennia ago, but Alek couldn't deny the stuff was seriously effective. Tutaminis really felt like cheating sometimes, he thought._

" _Thanks for the game, but I think I should be leaving now. Before anyone gets hurt." She turned to glare at him, and Alek winced at the cold accusation in her eyes. Then she was moving, striding stiffly for the door, annoyance heavy with every step._

" _Nujae!" That was the shifty-looking Herglic, thumping after Lesami with a twisted glare on his scarred face. "Don't you just be walking out. You broke the table. Those things aren't—"_

 _Lesami whirled around, looking up at the Herglic, her expression somewhere between exasperated and amused. Plucking at her dress — Alek noticed there were a few holes in the fabric, flashes of skin underneath circled by char — she said, "They bloody shot me! You want someone to pay for the damage, get them to do it." With a final disparaging glare around the room, Lesami turned on her heel, and was gone._

 _Alek was only a few steps behind her. No way in hell was he hanging around in there any longer than he had to — most of the patrons hadn't even put away their blasters yet. He nearly bumped into her just out on the concourse, standing there and glaring up at him. "I suppose you think that was my fault."_

" _It was." Lesami held out a hand, one eyebrow ticking up. "Give me your cloak."_

" _What are—"_

" _I'm not exactly decent right now, Alek. Give me your sodding cloak."_

 _Alek glanced down, felt his cheeks flare with heat an instant later. Glancing awkwardly to the side, Alek shrugged his cloak off his shoulders, handed it over. "Sorry."_

 _Lesami huffed, her eyes rolling. She whipped the heavy wool around her, hugging the fabric close to herself, started off to the left without another word, quick enough he had to jump forward to catch up. "Next time you find me in the middle of a sabaac game, don't go telling the people I'm playing with I'm a Jedi. Especially not if they happen to be armed. They'll assume I'm cheating, and people don't take that lightly."_

" _I didn't think of that, honestly." Alek ducked around a pack of wide-eyed Duros, weaving through the crowd back to Lesami._

" _Yeah, I noticed. You're an idiot like that."_

 _His lips twitched. "So cruel, Lesami. And I thought you liked me."_

" _I do. Doesn't mean you're not an idiot."_

" _Hmm." Alek took another glance at the towers around them, his brow dropping in a frown. "Uh, the lift back to the Temple Precinct was the other way."_

 _She shot a tight look at him over her shoulder. "I know which way the Temple is, Alek. It's late, I'm going home." Her pace hitched for a moment as she stepped into a rather rundown-looking commercial center. "Why did you come down after me anyway? Lessons for the day are surely all done by now."_

" _You didn't show up for lecture this afternoon. I was...concerned."_

" _Did the thought cross your mind that might have been on purpose?" Stepping onto a rickety turbolift, Lesami let out a low scoff, shaking her head to herself. "I swear, if I have to suffer Atris blathering on about the_ dangers of attachment _one more time, I'll... Well, I don't know what I'll do, but I'll probably get another talking-to from Janice over it."_

 _Alek shuffled his feet a little — he'd long ago ceased trying to get her to refer to Masters by their titles. He could count the Jedi Lesami showed the proper respect on his fingers. "This isn't a joking matter, Lesami."_

" _I think it is." The doors slid open, one of them creaking a little, and Lesami led them off through the hallways. Not toward the door outside, but into the maze stretching through the tower, Alek couldn't even guess where she was trying to get to. "You ever notice the irony in these silly lectures?" Lesami's voice fell, dropping into a fair imitation of Atris's low, husky drawl. She even got the Chandrillan accent mostly right. "_ Do not succumb to fear, for fear is of the Dark Side. And the Dark Side is bad, you should be very, very afraid of it _. I can't imagine how you_ don't _find it funny sometimes."_

 _Listening to his best friend mock the dangers of the Dark Side wasn't making him any less uncomfortable. "Lesami..."_

" _You don't have to say it. I know you're trying to do that proper Jedi thing these days. That's fine, I won't try to talk you out of it. I just... I just_ can't _, Alek." His cloak was thick enough to nearly hide the shrug of her shoulders. "It's not in me. Uncle Yuse taught me too well, I guess."_

 _Despite himself, he couldn't help a flare of curiosity, a question about this_ Uncle Yuse _on his lips before he suppressed it. Lesami hardly ever mentioned her family. Which was odd, considering she_ did _have some contact with them, however minimal that contact was. "There will be consequences for this sort of thing eventually, you know. Master Kreia won't be able to protect you from the Council forever."_

 _Stepping into yet another lift, Lesami snorted out a laugh. "What are they going to do, expel me from the Order? Oh, the horror. You might have forgotten this, Alek, but I never even wanted to be a Jedi in the first place. If my refusal to submit to their brainwashing annoys them, well, that doesn't sound like my problem, does it?"_

 _Alek winced — luckily they weren't at the Temple, he couldn't imagine other Jedi would have taken that comment well. "The Jedi don't brainwash their members, Lesami."_

" _Don't they?" She stared up at him, for some unfathomable reason looking almost amused. "If it were any other institution indoctrinating and dominating its own members the way the Order does, we'd be decrying them as a dangerous, abusive cult. You should consider reading_ Chains of the Mind _by Suvasha, you might find it enlightening."_

 _This wasn't the first time Lesami had mentioned Entari kun si Suvasha. She was a Shawkenese political philosopher and commentator, very old, lived during the early centuries of the Republic. When Lesami had first mentioned her, he'd looked her up — the Order considered her an anarchist and an anti-Republic radical, one of the ideological pillars of the Alsakan Conflicts and certain other separatist movements over the millennia, controversial enough apprentices and padawans needed permission to access anything attributed to her in the archive. He was never sure what to think about Lesami reading her so much. "I've read critics of the Order before. Much of it is nonsense."_

 _Lesami sniffed. "Alek, Suvasha hardly ever even mentions the Jedi in any of her work. It's just theory. I applied it to the Order on my own."_

 _That didn't make him feel any better._

* * *

When Mission woke up, everything hurt. It was a thin, hot sort of pain, spread through every muscle head to toe, heavy and exhausting. It left her feeling weak, shivering helplessly against the hard, dirty metal of the floor. Her senses were still fuzzy, as though her head were encased in foam, her thoughts sluggish enough there might be some inside her head too. But she only needed a couple seconds, she knew what this was.

Someone had hit her with a stun bolt.

She didn't remember what happened — most people didn't when they got stunned, it was a thing. But whatever it was, it couldn't be good. With force of will, nearly more than she had to give, Mission moved, move, come on, _move_. She could barely wiggle at the moment, her strength was coming back so slowly, but her hands shifted enough to feel they were bound together, she couldn't tell what with.

Okay. Gonna go with _definitely_ not good.

Her blurriness and fuzziness in her eyes and ears gradually faded away. The first thing she heard was Zee roaring and screaming, threats to rip their guts out, tear their faces from their skulls, split with curses in the names of his ancestors and his people's gods. Really nasty stuff, actually, she had no idea Zee had such a filthy mouth. And he scolded her for her language whenever she cussed even a little! She'd never heard Zee so scared before, so angry, she could feel it on his voice, as hard and sharp on the air as stepping into a distortion field.

Hearing Zaalbar in a terrified rage had her cold and shaking inside. He was frakking _huge_ and he wasn't scared of _anything_. Even things he probably _should_ be scared of. If _he_ was losing it, they were in serious trouble.

But, she'd sort of already figured that out. Her hands _were_ tied together. Her ankles too, she noticed when she tried to move. Yeah, not news.

There was a hissing splatter of a blaster bolt, and Zaalbar cut off with one last warbling call of her name. "Thought this one would never shut the fuck up." The voice was low, crackling, Huttese in a thick drawl.

"Better be worth the credits, hauling this thing around." This voice, sounding very Rodian, was also vaguely familiar, but she couldn't place it, like a word hidden at the edge of her tongue.

"Look at the size of him! Strong as anything I've ever seen. Buyer just has to collar him and it'll be fine, don't worry about it."

Mission's blood went even colder at the word, freezing in her veins completely, leaving her painfully stiff. _Slavers_. They'd been taken by _slavers_.

"I guess," the Rodian said, a little surly. "We going to the Exchange or the Hutts?"

"Hutts. They pay more for Twi'lek girls." Heavy, thudding steps came to a halt inches from her ear, then someone was grabbing her shoulder, fingers hard as steel, dragging her up to her feet. She wavered, still weak from the stun bolt, she would have fallen if he weren't hanging on to her.

She took a quick glance around, hoping to recognize where they were. She did, but it didn't make her feel any better. The edge of an old industrial district, mostly abandoned now, outside of a warehouse, swoop bikes and air speeders crowded around the cavernous entrance. It looked like Zee had tried to grab her and make a break for it at the last minute, they were a little ways from the pack of speeders, Zee stunned and bound on the floor just a couple feet away. She knew where this was, one of the smaller gangs had taken over the place a couple years ago. One of the nastier gangs. Rumor had it they made much of their money by snatching people, sold them to one slaver syndicate or another. It seemed the rumors were true, lucky her.

"Found us a pretty one, too." The man holding her upright, a human man with scars and pointy tattoos all over his face, was giving her a wide, toothy leer. His eyes trailed slowly downward, and Mission felt a sudden need to take a shower that had nothing to do with how filthy the floor she'd just been lying on was. "Almost seems a shame to hand her off to the Hutts without trying her out first."

"Red," the Rodian said, exasperated, "leave off. She's just a kid."

Mission bit her lip to hold in the automatic argument. If her choices were being a kid or being raped, she was picking the first one. She glanced toward the Rodian. Then stared, mouth and eyes wide, for a handful of seconds before she found her voice. "You!"

The Rodian — stang, what was his name, she knew she'd heard it — gave her a sickening glare. "Yes, little blue. Me. You cheated me out of a lot of money today."

"I don't know what you're talking about." She hoped the lie was believable, that the cringe stayed inside where it belonged. Couldn't remember his name, but she did recognize the guy, he'd been the last one she'd eliminated at the second table in the tournament. She gamed the shift a little to knock him out, same she'd had to do with Cina later. She'd thought nobody would notice, but it seemed at least two people had. And the Rodian was taking it a _lot_ harder than Cina had.

"Don't act dumb with me, kid. I've been playing since before you were born. I know a cheat when I see it."

Mission swallowed back a retort about his age, bad timing. "You are so dead. You grabbed me in the middle of Bek territory, slime-for-brains. You don't think Gadon is going to find out?" Ooh, when Zaedra got wind of this she was going to kill him _so_ bloody. It would be very gross. Zaerdra was scary like that.

The human let out a snorting guffaw. "Stupid little shit. Gadon doesn't rule the capital district anymore. He's on the way out. Good a way to learn as any I guess, huh?" he said to his partner in sleaze, chuckling to himself.

The Rodian didn't answer. But his snout curved in a cruel smirk.

Luckily for Mission, that was about when everything went to hell.

An airspeeder, peeling through the air so fast it squealed, zipped over their heads. Mission turned to follow it, on its careening path toward the mass of speeders outside the warehouse. So she only heard the body land and roll with a _thump-click-clunk_ , light steps rapidly closing. The human holding her cursed, whipped her around, trying to duck behind her much smaller body, pulling his blaster from his belt. Mission caught sight of the intruder even as the shot went off, screaming over her head to carve into flesh above her, the vise holding her shoulder immediately loosening.

She gaped. _Cina?_ It was definitely Cina, that soft-hearted off-worlder bookish type she'd run into at Javyar's (and later cheated out of hundreds of thousand of credits), a blaster in her hands and black fire in her eyes. Mission had written her off as harmless before, but she looked almost scary now, hard and cold and merciless. She'd killed that guy easy, he'd been using Mission as a shield but she'd just nailed him in the head with a single shot, snap, done. She'd been watching, Cina hadn't blinked. She hadn't even stopped moving, still running toward Mission like rakghouls were at her heels.

It was scary, but Mission wasn't scared. She felt like a balloon had gone off in her chest, her eyes were pricking with tears. They were saved. Everything would be fine.

The next instant, there was an ear-rending crash, an explosion of sparks, a roar of fire. Mission whirled around on her heel, then just stood gaping again. The airspeeder that had gone over their heads, it had smashed itself into the gang's haphazard parking lot, carving a furrow through the swoop bikes and airspeeders before just going up, taking a good fourth of the lot with it. The fire and the smoke completely blocked the warehouse entrance.

She didn't have any more time to look. Cina grabbed her by the wrists as she ran past, dragging her forward, the restraints digging into her. " _Move_ , go, go." Mission half-hopped half-hobbled the few feet to the nearest airspeeder — Red and the Rodian's, slightly removed from the rest — and Cina yanked her down to the ground, ducking behind the frame. Sitting with her back to it, she saw that friend of hers (some human guy, didn't remember his name), dragging Zee, still unconscious, toward them by the wrists. Zee was okay. They'd be fine, they'd get out of this.

The first blaster bolts started coming from the warehouse, burning across the air, pinging against the airspeeder. She winced — assuming they didn't get killed anyway.

"Lady, are you _insane_?!" The man dropped Zee's wrists, moved to kneel next to her, blasters appearing in each hand. He started taking potshots over the edge, his teeth gritting so hard the veins in his neck were jumping out.

"It worked, didn't it?" Cina pulled something out from her sleeve, a narrow metal tube a little longer than her hand, and—

Mission's mouth dropped open. A lightsaber! All blue and glowing and pretty, it was a _lightsaber!_ _Cina was a Jedi!_ She hardly noticed Cina slicing apart the bindings around her wrists and ankles, shuffling over to do the same for Zee. She just stared in numb wonder, her head a useless fuzz. She couldn't, she was being _rescued by a kriffing Jedi_ , she couldn't believe it, it was just—

"In case you haven't noticed, you _blew up_ our only means of transportation — which you _stole_ , by the way — and we're being shot at by dozens of angry gangsters! How does that spell _it worked_ to you?!"

"I think _dozens_ is overselling it a little." Cina jabbed a hypo into Zee's shoulder, and in the blink of an eye he was jumping to his feet, roaring in mad defiance. It only took a few blaster bolts screaming around his head for him to snap out of it, crouch down behind the airspeeder with the rest of them. "Mission, know any way we can lose them around here?"

"Ah..." Mission cringed at another volley of blaster bolts, the air nearly glowing with them, her arms rising to fold over her head on instinct. "Sure, I know a place, but we can't do it if we're all shot right away!"

Cina frowned, glancing around, her eyes flicking so quickly Mission couldn't tell what she was looking at. "Cover me."

The man scoffed. " _Cover you?!_ What— Hey!"

Before the man could stop her, Cina was running out into the rain of blaster fire, halfway bent over, arms folded over the back of her head. He cursed, loud and long, popped over the speeder to fire off a steady stream toward the warehouse. Zee was even helping, she wasn't sure where he'd gotten a blaster from. After a short distance weaving back and forth seemingly at random, Cina dropped to her knees at Red's corpse, started fiddling with something at his belt. But Mission wasn't watching her, her gaze distracted by Zee, fumbling with the too-small grip of the blaster.

She glanced toward the back of the speeder, the compartment there. With the way the speeder was turned, there wasn't a clear angle to the warehouse from there, but it wasn't as safe as back here. A peek around the corner showed a few glowing furrows from blaster shots around the edge, sparks dancing across the floor. But she was small, she could do it. She _could_.

Go. Go. _Go_.

Mission pushed herself up on shaky knees, darted around the corner of the speeder. Keeping as far to the back side as she could, she took a quick look along the seam the compartment made in the metal; she pulled a magnet from a pouch at her belt, ran it back and forth along the center of the lip. Ah, there it was, basic maglock. No problem. She drew her probe out of her sleeve, then hesitated, just a moment, drawing in a long breath.

Turning up on her knees, facing the lock, Mission flicked the probe on, the whirr of tiny electronics hidden by the screaming of blaster fire. Her hands were shaking, it took her a few tries to work the tip into the seam, the lock weakened, she nearly dropped her knife, but she had the tip through the gap a second later, the latch should be right...

There was an ear-piercing scream of superheated air and metal, so loud her head rang, her heart nearly jumped out of her chest, sparks falling to pinch at her skin. " _Frakk!_ Shit..." She'd slipped, the probe was out of place, she wedged it back—

"Mission!"

"Get back here, kid!"

"I've almost got it!" Even as she said it, her knife met a bit of resistance, a flick of her finger had the vibration turned on full. With a cry of shearing metal, the compartment popped open. "Yes!" She tipped up to her feet, making sure to put the door of the compartment between herself and the source of the blasterfire. There was Zee's bowcaster, his ammo belt wrapped around the haft. Oh, hey, there was her pad and holo too, couldn't leave those here. The pad slipped into her belt and the holo latched onto her wrist where it belonged, Mission wrapped both arms around Zee's ridiculously huge gun — seriously, the thing was _big_ , she nearly tipped over into the compartment just trying to lift it.

She ducked back around the corner, just in time to catch Cina rolling over the door of the speeder to disappear inside. Ignoring how it made her arms burn and her elbows twinge, she tossed Zee his bowcaster. With a smirk that was probably far more shaky than she would like, "Am I good or what?"

Zee's furry brow dropped in a disapproving glare. "That was very dangerous, Mission." But he left it at that, loading his bowcaster with a sharp yank and a heavy clank. He tossed the blaster he had been using toward her, rose to his knees to take shots at these sleazy punks again, the heavy thrumming of his bowcaster carrying under the much higher standard blasters, shots slow and measured.

And, knowing Zee, terrifyingly precise. He was a scary good shot with that thing.

Having caught the blaster without thinking, Mission just stared at it for a moment. This was _hers_. How had— Oh, the Rodian must have nicked it. Never mind, not important. Mission didn't bother using it, just slipped the thing back into its holster. She wasn't that good of a shot to begin with, and with how many people they had shooting at them, her hands were still shaking, no, not worth it. "Still waiting on the plan to get us out of here."

The human man, jaw clenching so hard his neck got all weird and ridgy, paused in his seemingly random shooting to switch out power cells (which took a shockingly short amount of time, his hands moved damn _fast_ ). "I get the feeling Hayal is working on another insane plan involving explosions."

"Done." Rolling over the door again, Cina dropped down next to her, landing almost silently on the balls of her feet. Well, silently except for the clattering of her blaster and the jangling of credits, anyway. "When the speeder starts moving, run. Mission, which way are we going?"

"Ah..." Mission squinted through the smoke, turned bright and opaque by the constant blaster fire. "Right there, that tiny little storehouse right there, there's a staircase in the back."

Zee grunted. "Our nest above Eyvar's."

"Yeah, through the maintenance level. They can't get their speeders in there, and it'll be easy to lose 'em."

"You know the way, Zaalbar?" He gave Cina a nod, getting another nod back. "Good. Carry Mission." Zee just nodded again, kept shooting.

"Hey! I can—"

Cina's eyes flicked to her, and she had scary face on, all hard and too still, her eyes black, sparkling with red from reflected blaster shots. "You have shorter legs than the rest of us, and you're still weak from being stunned. You can't keep up. Zaalbar will carry you."

Mission wasn't proud to admit she might have pouted a little. How _dare_ Cina have a good point?

A few seconds later, the speeder jolted, lifted a few inches off the ground and started sliding to the side. Leaning against it, Mission almost toppled over, she had to scramble to stay upright. The speeder moved slow at first, turning and rising another couple feet, Zaalbar and Cina and the human geezer standing upright as it moved, still firing back toward the warehouse in a steady, screaming stream. Mission jumped, pushed herself to her feet, brought her blaster up—

"Go!" Cina turned and broke into a run, whipping by Mission, the man just behind her, before she could barely blink, Zaalbar was there, ducking down, lifting her at the waist over his shoulder so quickly it drove the breath out of her lungs.

Facing backward, Mission saw the speeder suddenly take off, streaking toward the warehouse door at full acceleration. The hail of blaster shots focused on the speeder, the front end flaring a brilliant yellow, but it was moving too quick, it was too big, they wouldn't—

The speeder slammed into the wall just above the doors, then vanished in a flood of yellow and orange fire, flashing outward, consuming one figure and another, half her vision completely consumed with light and heat. The shockwave hit them a moment later, like repulsorlifts passing too close over her head, Zaalbar's loping strides faltering for just a second before picking up again, pulling ahead of the humans.

Mission turned to sneak a glance over Zaalbar's shoulder, measured the distance to the much smaller storehouse. Then she looked back, squinted through the scope of her blaster, looking for anything moving through the mass of smoke, fitfully flickering with a dozen little fires. She kept searching until metal walls blocked her vision.

She finally let the smile break across her face. There _were_ people following them, but only a few, and they were already too far behind.

They were going to make it. They were saved.

* * *

"Are you _completely insane_ , woman?! Are you _trying_ to get us killed?"

Cina swallowed her mouthful of nyra juice, rolling her eyes. "Oh, settle down, Carth. It worked, didn't it?"

The exhausting man was startled out of his tirade for a second — probably because she'd actually used his first name, she didn't think she'd ever done that before. Finally, he managed, "We're lucky we got away with that. We didn't have the numbers to— Do you just _like_ explosions, is that it?"

Her lips twitched with a smirk. "What can I say? Fire gets me hot."

"Ooohh!" Mission apparently couldn't decide if she wanted to groan or laugh. "That was _terrible_."

Cina winked at her. At least the girl appreciated a bad pun.

For a couple seconds, he managed to keep up a proper glare, but it quickly collapsed. He leaned back into his chair with a heavy sigh. The thing groaned with the movement, the cloth squeaking.

Zaalbar had lead them to one of his and Mission's hideouts — apparently they had a few, dotted across the capital district. This one had been an abandoned apartment, smaller than the one she and Onasi had claimed, a single little room and a fresher she'd initially mistaken for a closet. They'd filled the place out, with torn and creaky furniture, bits of electronic equipment stacked all over the place, only about a third of which Cina actually recognized, little figurines Zaalbar had apparently whittled out of plastic, string lights hung all over the walls, the ceiling.

As much as Carth complained about the lack of floorspace when he'd first seen it, Cina thought it was surprisingly homey. She had to wonder if all their places were as nice as this one.

"I just wish we would talk things out before you, just, _do_ it." Oh, right, Carth was still complaining. "I mean, that was _very_ risky. I still think we should have tried going to these Beks. They probably would have helped, given us better odds at least."

Cina shook her head. "Bad idea. We had to stay on them the whole time, or we might have lost them. And those were slavers — by the time the Beks could round up the blasters needed to hit that warehouse, Mission and Zaalbar might have been long gone."

Carth opened his mouth to argue, but Mission got there first. "She's right. I bet they'd only stopped to move us to a bubble speeder. The Hutts are a few levels up, there are cameras there. By the time you got back we'd be gone, you'd never have found us again." A shade of fear crossed Mission's face at the thought, but she recovered quickly. She'd been shaky during the shooting, but she was much better now, already smirking and joking. Tough kid.

"Fine! Fine, I give up. Next time you have a completely insane plan, I'll just sit back and not say anything."

She smirked. "Good boy."

Just as Carth finished his grumbling, the hallway door slipped open, and Zaalbar shuffled inside, gently closing and locking the door behind him. He probably had to do everything gently, considering how naturally strong Wookiees were. He hung his bowcaster on a nearby hook, a low groan emanating from the beleaguered plastic. Which also wasn't a surprise, those things were bloody heavy — honestly, Cina was a little impressed Mission had even managed to lift it. In a warbling, guttural growl, he said, "I canvassed the whole square. We were not followed."

Mission scoffed. "Of course we weren't followed. They lost us before we even left Khunas."

"Yes," he agreed, something to the rumble of his voice sounding reluctant, "but I would prefer to err on the side of caution, in this matter."

"Oh, I ain't arguing there. Did I try to stop you going out to check? Take no chances dealing with slavers, hundred percent. If we hadn't had _a kriffing Jedi_ swoop in to save us like a hero in a terrible holodrama, we'd have been so, well, it would have been bad. Very bad." Mission turned back to Cina, expression solemn and eyes clouded, more serious-looking than she thought she'd ever seen the excitable girl. "Thanks for that, by the way. We owe you like a million." Zaalbar grumbled in agreement, shaggy head nodding.

But Cina just stared back, slowly blinking. She glanced at Carth, but he looked far too amused. A dark sort of amusement, she guessed, a crooked smirk that hinted at far too much experience with crazy Jedi, but she didn't see what about this was so funny. Finally, she found her voice again. "I'm not a Jedi."

Mission rolled her eyes. "Uh-huh. Sure."

"No, really, I'm _not_ a Jedi." At least, she didn't _think_ she was a Jedi — she had no idea _what_ she was, her head being the confusing fucked up mess it was, but she was pretty sure she would have noticed if she had reality-bending magic powers.

Jedi might deny what they did was magic, but come on, it was _obviously_ magic. She was pretty sure they just didn't like the word. It sounded too primitive and undignified. Which should come as no surprise, they were self-important arses like that.

But anyway, having a conversation here. "What the hell makes you think I'm a Jedi anyway?"

Mission gave her an annoyed look, silently telling her to quit the act, her playing dumb was just irritating. "Uh, you swooped in to rescue two practical strangers from being sold into slavery in a poorly thought-out rush that involved explosions and running through blaster fire like a crazy person. Also? _You have a kriffing lightsaber!"_ Her voice had risen almost to a shout, pointing an accusing finger at her.

Letting out a sharp, shocked bark of laughter, Carth said, "She's got you there, Cianen. Only a Jedi could pull that kind of shit and expect to come out alive."

"Son of a— _Honestly_ , Mission, I'm not a Jedi. This," she said, tapping the hilt of the lightsaber hidden under her shirt, "wasn't mine. The Jedi it belonged to is dead." A look of shock crossed Mission's face. "I didn't kill her!" Well, she _had_ killed her, technically, but Annas would have died anyway. Cina had just cut her suffering short. "She gave it to me. I don't know why, Jedi are weird. But, point is, I'm _not_ a Jedi."

"I don't know, you could be. It's not impossible. We really have no idea who you were before." Because this was the perfect moment for Carth to tell Mission and Zaalbar about her exciting adventures in brain damage.

"What do you mean, who she was before?" Mission glanced between the two of them, face scrunched with an adorable little frown.

Cina shot Carth a hooded glare. Not helping. "Fine, _so far as I am aware_ , I am not a Jedi."

That just made Mission frown harder. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Tell me about it."

Zaalbar, still looming over them a few steps inside the door, stared at Cina, dark eyes uncomfortably heavy. "You...are not a Jedi?"

It took a second for Cina to figure out what he was saying. Wookiees couldn't pronounce _Jedi_ , of course — he'd literally said something about warriors and souls and vines, it was confusing. "Oh. No, no I'm not."

"And you are not with any security force, or sworn to serve the Republic. Or anything of the like."

"No?" That didn't _sound_ like something she would have done, anyway... "Carth is Republic, but I'm not. What does that matter?"

Zaalbar stared at her for another moment. Tense and still, an odd sense of intensity almost seeming to radiate out of him. His black gaze tracked to Mission, only for a second, before flicking back to her. "You rescued the two of us from a horrible fate, at no small risk to yourself. You did this despite being under no obligation to do so, with no expectation of repayment of any kind."

Distantly, her inexplicable knowledge of Wookiee culture filling in the blanks, Cina felt her eyes widen and her lips part a sliver — she knew where this was going. Mission caught it just as she did, straightening in her chair. "Woah, Zee, wait up a sec—"

"I have no choice, Sister. My honor is already too far blackened for me to sully it once again." His voice turned deeper, the subtle sense of formality always apparent in his speech turning almost poetic. "I owe you my life, friend. The spirits of our ancestors be witness, I will follow you through sky and through shadow until my debt be paid."

Cina opened her mouth, intending to tell him to keep his debt, she didn't want it. But then she froze, cursing silently. She couldn't refuse. Well, she _could_ — there was plenty of precedent for a Wookiee rejecting a life-debt, their law accounted for it — but she _shouldn't_. The Wookiees were a primitive tribal people, and they took their concept of honor very, _very_ seriously. Most Wookiees considered their honor to be more valuable than their lives. Zaalbar was correct in that there were no extenuating circumstances Cina was aware of that would invalidate the debt, not according to their own law. Cina could theoretically get one of their lawspeakers to find a loophole for her, if she really wanted to get out of it, but they didn't exactly have one of those on hand.

Refusing a legitimate debt would be an insult. Essentially, she would be telling Zaalbar his life wasn't valuable enough for him to repay her for preserving it. There were very few things _more_ insulting. By the look of him, Zaalbar was still rather young for his species, in the equivalent of his teenage years. She had no idea exactly how much refusing him would hurt him, but it wouldn't be good.

And besides, there could be benefits to having him along. He was a _very_ good shot with that bowcaster of his, she'd noticed, and by the way he talked he was a rather thoughtful, intelligent sort. And, if he was comfortable considering Mission family, she probably felt much the same — getting her on-side could be a massive boon in tracking down Shan, given her skill with slicing.

And it would only be for a little while. A Wookiee life-debt was not forever — they would be joined together until Zaalbar felt the aid he gave Cina surpassed what she had done for him. With how dangerous recovering Shan and getting off the planet was bound to be, that shouldn't even be very long.

Suffocating the last traces of her reluctance, Cina dug for the proper response. She couldn't pronounce the language, of course, but she could translate the ritual words easily enough. "I accept your vow, friend. The spirits of our ancestors be witness, I will lead you through sky and through shadow until your heart by free."

Zaalbar seemed a little surprised she knew exactly what to say — at least, she _thought_ he was, Wookiee body language was tricky. But he nodded and, without another word, turned to fiddle with the equipment stacked in a row by the door. Preparing dinner, by the look of it.

Well. That was that, then.

"Okay," Carth said in a low drawl, "what the hell was that about?"

"Zee just swore Cina a life-debt." There was an obvious note of awe to Mission's voice — clearly, she'd picked up a bit over however many years she and Zaalbar had been together. "Which, which is _huge_. You get that, right, Cina? 'Cause, if you hurt Big Zee, I'm gonna..."

Cina couldn't help smiling a little at the threat. "Yes, Mission, I get it." Better than she did, probably. Not that Cina had any idea how she knew so much about Wookiee tribal law. "Don't worry, I'll mind myself about him."

Even with that paltry reassurance, Mission was bursting into a bright grin. Though, maybe she'd just been thoroughly convinced by this point of the purity of Cina's intentions — she had, after all, done nothing about Mission swindling her out of hundreds of thousands of credits, then showed up out of nowhere to save herself from the consequences of her own actions. By this point, Mission probably thought she was...well, as she'd put it, _a hero in a terrible holodrama_.

It was a little amusing, actually. It wasn't so long ago, shooting her way out of the _Spire_ , that Cina had had the same thought herself.

"Well, wherever Zee goes, I go. So I guess you're stuck with me too."

Cina's smile tilted a little into a teasing smirk. "Somehow I'll survive."

"You've got to be kidding me." Despite the disbelief in his words, the tone of Carth's voice was far more defeated, a final gasp of resistance before surrender. "Unless you forgot, Professor, we have a job to do here. We can't rescue Bastila and babysit street kids and thieves at the same time."

"Hey! Watch who you're calling kid!"

Cina snorted. "Not disputing the _thief_ part, I see."

Mission's lekku shifted in a smooth shrug. "You don't know me, old man. I got mad skills, just you watch. You got something you need decrypted, or a system you gotta slice into, or data you gotta filter, or—"

"Actually, Mission, I have a job I think you might be perfect for." That had the girl cutting off immediately, shooting her another grin; the contrast against Carth's dour glare just made it seem all the more brilliant. "As you might have guessed by now, we were with the Republic fleet the Sith crushed in orbit a couple days ago."

Her nose scrunched up again in adorable confusion. Twi'leks did tend to be cute, of course, it was completely unfair. "I thought you said you weren't with the Republic."

"I'm not. I was hired by the Jedi to translate the inscriptions on some old ruins they found, long story." It was a long story not even getting into the fact that she was convinced the entire thing about the ruins had been some convoluted front to get her to Dantooine for reasons she couldn't begin to guess at. "Carth is Republic, though. This stick-in-the-mud is kind of famous, actually, look up his name later.

"Anyway, out of the goodness of my heart—" Carth coughed. "—I decided to help Captain Onasi here track down his commanding officer. One Jedi Knight Bastila Shan." By the way Mission's eyes nearly popped out of her skull, that name she'd _definitely_ heard before. "We know she got off the ship, on one of the escape pods. We're _hoping_ she made it to the surface alive, and is still around somewhere. If you could find her somehow, that'd be a big help. Maybe the cameras caught her at some point, or if someone found her there might be chatter on the net..."

"I'll do you one better. I just realized, maybe she..." Mission pulled out her datapad, poked around on it for a little bit. There was a blue flicker at her wrist, and a mobile holoprojector sparked into life, a half life-size image forming in the middle of room. "I didn't think of it before, but, that's Bastila, isn't it?"

It was a still image, showing three figures. Two of them, a Kajain'sa'Nikto and a human, were armed to the teeth, with pistols and rifles and layered in expensive-looking armor. Decorated, she noticed, with Black Vulkar insignia. Between them was a human woman, a shock collar tight around her neck and what looked like a high-grade neural disruptor around her temples, her wrists bound with plastic cuffs. She'd been forced into something black and tight and revealing — it might as well be lingerie, really — faded traces of bruises and scrapes from being rattled around during reentry still visible.

The human gangster, a dark-skinned man with a wicked smile, had a hand clenched around her jaw, turning her face to the camera. The way she was dressed was so severely out of character it would be funny in a less exploitative context, but there was no mistaking who she was.

Cina didn't think she'd heard Carth swear quite that loudly before. It was almost impressive.

* * *

Sabaac — _The deck and the rules have been slightly changed from canon. Partially for balance, partially to make the strategy involved more complex and interesting. It's not super important, I won't be going over it in detail._

 _I did play with the names of the cards slightly, mostly to realign their meanings with the major arcana they were copied from. Balance, for example, is obviously supposed to be Justice, but the direct meaning is too off for my liking, especially in a culture that might have completely forgotten what balance scales even are. Moderation was also changed back to Temperance. (Just because "moderation" is used in the dictionary definition doesn't mean the words are interchangeable.)_

Sabaac cards — _They are essentially static displays, since they have to change. But in some media, I see creators conclude this means they have to be firm, hard plastic -like things. Uh...no? Some tech person with nothing better to do with their time could theoretically make randomizable, flexible playing cards_ _right now_ _, using OLEDs on a rubbery plastic substrate (probably some kind of polyethylene) with minimal embedded bluetooth (or similar local wireless protocol). Getting it to spring back like cardboard would be more difficult, but this is_ _new_ _materials science to us. You're telling me a hyper-advanced space-faring society like the one in Star Wars couldn't come up with something much more efficient and durable? Please. They're a thousand times easier to implement than fucking holograms._

 _Yes, I realize I think far too hard about this stuff._

sorcery — _Headcanon: sorcery, like alchemy, is a method of using the Force, not necessarily Light or Dark. Sith sorcery and alchemy are far more well-known in the modern day, but the Jedi_ did _once practice their own Light Side forms of the arts. They'd both been abandoned over the millennia Jedi have existed, though, for philosophy reasons that will come up later. Most Jedi never even learn about them, to the point few are aware some standard abilities like tutaminis and most forms of healing are technically sorcery._

* * *

 _Whew. Finally._

 _Yes, I'm streamlining the Taris sequence significantly. I personally don't like it much, so I decided to cut out a lot of the random wandering around and backtracking and get right to the point. Taris should only take a few more chapters, in fact, and we'll be moving on._

 _Until next time,  
~Wings_


	7. Taris — III

_It happened too quickly for Bastila to really see it, her vision overwhelmed with brilliant light, her eyes burning. The noise was all-consuming, the vibrations shaking her body numb, so intense she couldn't feel, she couldn't think. It went on for an infinite instant, fire and chaos, surrounding her hot and cold, the Force around her filled with screams of pain and the void of death._

 _And then it was over, abruptly as it'd begun._

 _Bastila opened herself to the Force almost without thinking. Soothing warmth coursed through her, turned only slightly pungent from the agony of the dying. Millions of microlacerations in her tissues were stitched back together in a blink, sensation quickly returning to her as healing life flooded into her head. She turned onto her knees, balance only slightly shaking, lightsaber slapping into her palm with a reflexive reach. She turned, instinctively, toward where Revan had been, preparing to—_

 _She stopped dead. That light, whatever that had been, had torn through the huge transparisteel viewports forming a ring around the bridge, the crew stations to her left and right, all down the length of the large triangular room scorched and shredded. A few spots here and there still glowed, superheated materials afire from within. It was just...gone, the whole bridge was_ gone _. All the crew were dead, nothing of them left, the faintly crackling blue haze of the ray shields the only thing standing between Bastila and oblivion._

 _The forward point of their safe corridor was a wreck, metals and plastics blackened and warped. Whatever blast had taken out the bridge must have burned through the shield, only temporarily before the system compensated. A paltry handful of meters from the center of the blast were two figures. One wore Jedi robes, the cloth dotted with blood in a couple places, stripes of black left from passing lightsabers. Kavarr, he was alive. He was kneeling over another, mostly hidden under a pooling cloak of red and black._

Revan.

" _Is she..." Bastila didn't finish the question: she already knew. She could feel it. The faintest warmth, sunlight blocked by layers of cloud, a heartbeat more felt than heard. Revan yet lived. Barely. Her presence in the Force was weak, flickering, faltering._

" _It is done." With surprising gentleness, Kavarr laid a hand on Revan's unmoving shoulder, his presence cool and still and solemn. "It is a shame, the way things turned out. She had such promise."_

 _Bastila knew there was some truth to that, no matter how...controversial Lesami po si Revas had been with the masters from the beginning. She was exceptionally powerful, of course, exceptionally gifted. Bastila hadn't even heard of her before the war — she was a decade younger, and they'd been trained in different enclaves — but everyone had known about Revan, that dramatic, charismatic figure leading dozens of Jedi to take the fight to the Mandalorians, in explicit defiance of the Council. No one had known who Revan really was, of course, knowledge of her real name had been strictly classified back then, but everyone talked about her, all the time. Not always in a flattering light, especially among the older Jedi, but to the younger generations..._

 _It was somewhat embarrassing looking back on it now, but Bastila had admired Revan, once upon a time. "Admired" might be too soft a word, in fact._

This _, she had thought,_ this is what a Jedi is supposed to be. This is our true calling.

 _Not sitting in some temple somewhere, constantly philosophizing and bickering in the abstract, contemplating the Force in isolation, no,_ no _. Jedi were meant to be out in the world, they were meant to serve their fellow beings, in whatever capacity their own talents allowed. They were meant to bring light to the darkness, relief to the oppressed, succor to the poor and the outcast. They were meant to lead, they were meant to inspire._

 _A younger, more innocent Bastila had seen Revan's actions, heard her words, and thought to herself,_ Yes, this is what we truly are. This is what we are meant to be.

 _Then, Revan and the Jedi she had led into war had become something...else. And Bastila had learned exactly what the masters had been afraid of the entire time. In retrospect, that she had been so taken with the passion and the pride that had inevitably led to corruption was a little horrifying, she preferred to not think about it._

 _If Bastila had only been a little older,_ she _could be..._

 _And there she was. A warrior turned murderer, a champion turned tyrant. The woman once credited with saving the Republic from the brink of annihilation, only to turn around and bring it to its knees once again. Lying there — beaten, broken, done._

 _There was something strangely sad about it. It just didn't seem... It felt empty, somehow. All the ways Revan could have died, this wasn't one Bastila would have imagined. Larger-than-life figures like this weren't supposed to go out quietly, sinking into an unconsciousness so deep they'd never rise from it. Before, fighting the Mandalorians, she should have died in a blaze of self-sacrificial glory, taking a thousand of the galaxy's most fearsome warriors with her, perhaps covering the retreat of her men, yes, selfless and terrible and awe-inspiring. A martyr, a symbol to take them through the rest of the war. Now, as the leader of the Sith, it should be just as terrible, though in a different way — a final, desperate gamble, perhaps, power and pride and self-destructive theatrics, inevitably including some diatribe about how they small-minded fools simply couldn't understand the brilliance of her vision. Something, there should be_ something _._

 _Standing there in the ruined remains of the bridge, surrounded by death, the battle still raging beyond the thin ionizing field isolating them from the void, the idea couldn't quite penetrate. It didn't feel quite real, some visceral part of her rejected the thought out of hand. It wasn't..._

 _She couldn't quite believe that_ this _was the end of Lesami po si Revas, of Revan,_ the _Revan. It just felt...wrong._

 _The deck shook, the superstructure of the massive ship raked with further turbolaser blasts, the scattered light dazzling her vision, again and again and again. Through the flashes and the spotting, she saw Kavarr rise, slowly, as though he'd aged decades in but moments. "We need to leave." And he started toward her, toward the door back into the rest of the ship._

 _He left Revan on the floor behind him._

 _The words blurted out with absolutely no conscious input from her. "We can't just leave her here."_

 _Kavarr stopped, stared at her. He wasn't surprised, exactly, his face hard but his eyes soft. "She will not survive, Padawan. Your instincts guide you well, but—"_

 _Without really meaning to, without even realizing she was doing it, Bastila had moved, kneeling over Revan's motionless body, her form hidden under layers of cloth and armor. And the Force leapt at her invitation, thick and warm, garren chowder at the end of a long day, a thick blanket on a winter night._

 _They'd saved her, but it wasn't enough._

 _In the silence of hyperspace, racing for Dantooine with their illicit cargo, Bastila sat in the tiny medbay of their unassuming freighter, sat with Revan. She was so small. They'd removed her robes and her armor, her infamous mask, and she was so_ small _. Standing she'd be shorter than Bastila, toned but somehow more delicate-looking than she had any right to be. She looked like any other human woman, really. It was almost hard for Bastila to remember who this was, this was_ Revan _, she just seemed so...ordinary._

 _Bastila had seen holos of Jedi Lesami before, of course. It still seemed strange, though, somehow wrong._

She's going to die on this table.

 _They could both feel it, she and Kavarr, they knew. They'd healed her body, yes, but her spirit still felt so weak, so far away. She was sitting within arm's reach, and she could still barely feel it. And it wasn't the fault of the sedatives — Kavarr had insisted on it, they couldn't risk her actually waking up. They'd healed her body, but her mind was still dying, still drifting away. Soon she would fade to nothing, and Revan would be gone._

 _It still felt wrong. Over the last hours, she still hadn't managed to find the words to describe exactly why the thought bothered her so much. She simply couldn't imagine Revan,_ the _Revan, dying here, like this. It was just wrong._

 _Idly, without fully thinking through what she was doing, Bastila reached for the dying woman's mind. She'd always had a talent for this sort of thing. Perhaps she could feel what was wrong, could do something about it. Because Revan_ shouldn't _still be dying, they had healed her, there was nothing wrong with her..._

 _The instant she made contact, Bastila was overwhelmed with an inescapable tide of darkness._

 _Not_ Darkness _, no, this was something entirely different. Something different from what she'd honestly expected. She'd expected to find a mind consumed with hatred, with fury, so twisted and tainted by the Dark Side it was hardly recognizable as a person anymore. She'd expected corruption and madness, and little else._

 _She hadn't anticipated despair._

 _Opening up beneath her like the yawning void, blackness reaching for her, drawing her further inward._

 _She'd tried. But it was exhausting, she was so_ tired _._

 _Day after day, years upon years, one disaster after another..._

 _She wanted to think she was accomplishing something, but it just got worse, and worse, and_ worse...

 _Nothing would ever change, and she was so_ tired _of trying._

 _Lesami knew she hadn't died, not really. She could feel the pull back to the living world. But oblivion in the Force called to her. It called to her, soft and quiet, she could finally lay down all her cares, she could finally_ rest _. And she was so tired._

 _The part of Bastila that was still entirely herself was taken aback. Revan was still fading because she_ wanted _to. She'd given up. She would let herself slip peacefully into the Force, and that would be the end of it._

 _For some reason she couldn't describe, the realization made Bastila furious._

 _She didn't think about it, she wasn't fully aware what she was doing. It was instinct, anger made power, will made motion. One foot firmly planted in the physical world, Bastila groped for the mind drifting away from her, wrapped herself around it, pulled, pulled, with everything she had she_ pulled—

 _Not just around it, she forced herself_ into _it, pouring into Revan's blackened mind with light tempered by fury. No, she didn't get to die, not like this, not like_ this _, not when there were still questions to be answered, crimes to answer for, amends to be made, she_ wasn't allowed _to surrender like this, not if Bastila had anything to say about it, she would—_

 _And the mind she surrounded and was surrounded by responded, slowly at first. Because Bastila was right, there was still so much to be done, she couldn't leave it, not like this, not like_ this—

 _Her eyes snapped open and she sprang out of bed, the lamp bursting into life at her touch. For a moment, her eyes were dazzled, but she quickly recovered, glancing frantically around the room, panic setting her blood to burning and her empty hands twitching. But there was nothing, she was alone, it was just a dream, she—_

In an abrupt moment of clarity, Bastila ripped it all away, surrounded herself with mental walls of thickest durasteel. And she was awake, back in her cage, the chill of the floor and bars against her skin contributing but little to her shivering.

Hands tight against her face, she squeezed her eyes shut. She gathered all her terror, all her shame, all her despair, filling her near to bursting, and she cast it out into the Force, where it could all fly far away from her.

But she couldn't. She couldn't even touch the Force. She was alone.

The first sob wrenched itself out of her throat before she could stop it. And then it was too late.

* * *

Cina glared at Carth over her caf. The arse had the nerve to just smile back at her like an idiot. "I didn't sleep well, okay? Shut up."

"I didn't say anything," he insisted, with a smirk that said everything.

"No, but your face is annoying enough words aren't necessary."

He snorted. "Mission has been a terrible influence on you."

That had Cina smiling, despite how completely awful she felt. Carth thought _Mission_ was a bad influence on _her?_ He clearly hadn't been listening when they'd talked about slicing the city infrastructure.

The brash little kid was out there somewhere, probably with Zaalbar in one of their safehouses they apparently had scattered all over the capital. After they were dragged off to meet this Gadon Thek person, Cina had offered to let them stay with her and Carth in the apartment they'd stolen. Safety in numbers, and all that — it wasn't impossible someone was still out there looking for them, considering the scale of that stunt they'd pulled yesterday. But Mission had waved it off, quick confirmed they had each other's com codes, and disappeared.

Well, disappeared after waiting for Zaalbar to extract a promise from Cina she wouldn't do anything stupid without calling him first. Wookiees did take their life debts seriously.

"So." Cina took a bite out of her protein bar — then she grimaced, turning a glare down at the thing. She hadn't thought these things even _could_ expire. That's it, she was buying some real food later, she didn't care that their money problems had suddenly gotten far more urgent practically overnight. "We need credits, and we need them fast."

"What, don't have another windfall waiting in the wings?"

She shot him a glare. It had just been good luck there happened to be a sabaac tournament going on so soon after they arrived. She wasn't some sort of professional scam artist or anything.

... She didn't _think_ she was. That didn't sound like the sort of thing she would be.

"This one's yours, Flyboy. I can't do everything around here."

Carth huffed, but as far as she was concerned he had absolutely nothing to complain about. She'd secured a place to stay, formed a working relationship with a local power, recruited a skilled marksman and a talented slicer, _and_ acquired intelligence on where Shan was and when and how to get close enough to make an attempt at recovering her. She'd done nearly all his work for him. "I don't know. I still think we should try to convince Thek to lend us a swoop."

She shook her head. "He won't. We're not worth that much to him." Thek seemed to have some affection for the Republic, but handing over a speeder — one good enough to compete in the race at that — was far too high a price. People died in swoop races, all the time, and if whichever one of them did the flying managed to get themselves killed, losing the bike in the crash was more than he could afford to spend on them. Honestly, allowing them to wear his colours for the day was more than she'd expected, given how much face he could lose if they made complete arses of themselves.

"We could try to steal one."

Which, at the rate Carth was going, was almost guaranteed. "Onasi, that is the stupidest idea I've ever heard."

"Oh, come on, some of these gangs don't have the discipline to—"

"How many bikes do you think any of them have that are actually quick enough to handle this kind of race? I'd be surprised if the _Beks_ have more than five, and they're one of the big fish around here. You don't find that kind of hardware sitting out on a concourse, Carth, those bikes are seriously expensive, and they take constant attention from professional mechanics to keep them running at peak. Not only would we have trouble stealing something so valuable, but you can be sure they'll recognise the thing when we turn up with it at the circuit. Which is like to spark a light before we even get started.

"No," Cina said, sharply shaking her head, "if we want any chance of getting close enough to nab Shan, we need to place high in that race, and to do that we need a _lot_ of fucking credits. What I got from the tournament isn't nearly enough."

Carth winced — apparently the same thing had occurred to him, just hoping Cina would come up with some trick to pull it off. Or maybe that was from biting into his bar. Once he'd choked the shite down, he cleared his throat, washing his mouth out with a generous gulp of caf. "Right. And you have no ideas what we should do?"

"Fuck me, can you have a _single_ original thought of your own?"

His face immediately hardened into something cold and stoney, his glare impressively intense compared to his usual light smirking. "I'm a fighter pilot, Cianen. I'm a little out of my depth here."

"I know, I—" Cina forced out a harsh sigh, one hand rising to rub at her temple. It didn't do a thing about her headache, of course. "I'm sorry. I just feel awful, I shouldn't take it out on you."

The statuesque severity vanished, replaced with a hesitant sort of concern. "Are you...okay?"

"Relax, Carth," she said, her eyes rolling of their own accord. "The Jedi magic holding my head together is doing just fine. I'm not going insane on you, I just didn't sleep well." Though, dreams about bodiless Jedi falling into an abyss of despair that never ended wasn't indicative of a perfect grip on reality, but there was no reason Carth needed to know about that. "And no, I don't have any ideas. Hunting a few marks for the Exchange is the only thing I can think of that _might_ get us enough credits to meet the deadline, but I don't think either of us want to go there."

Carth sneered, shaking his head to himself. "No, let's not. We might just have to crash the party."

"That...would be risky." An understatement if Cina had ever made one. All the lower city gangs would be there, the Exchange and the Hutts, all their enforcers and their thugs and their mercenaries. Sneaking in wouldn't be difficult. Snatching Shan and making a break for it?

If Carth really wanted to kill himself, there were less painful ways to go about it.

"We'll work something out. If nothing else, we can always tail whoever wins her, break into their place, and kill everyone in our way."

The idea seemed to make Carth a little ill. But his head dipped in an uncertain nod anyway, fingers tightening around his mug. "Before they sell her to the Sith."

"Well, yes, obviously."

"And then we have to find some way to get all of us off planet and through the blockade."

"Let me fix _your_ problem I'm currently working on before giving me new ones, okay? I'm just one woman, honestly."

Carth just smiled back at her — as though that weren't irritating enough on its own. One of these days someone was going to blast that stupid roguish smile off his stupid handsome face.

* * *

After spending a few days in the lower city, seeing actual sunlight was a little strange. Not _bad_ , of course, just peculiar.

The air smelled a _lot_ better, at least.

Cina had made her way to the upper city by herself. It was about time to bring in Asyr, but she had reasons of her own. Partially to check how much a high-end speeder bike actually ran for, partially to look around for any promising money-making opportunities, but mostly just to give herself a few hours away from Carth to think. He kept trying to talk to her, it was very distracting.

Her research on the net and talks with dealers were less than encouraging. Assuming the gangs were using tournament-standard sport bikes — which, given that Taris had been part of the professional circuit before the Sith took over, was quite likely — any model that would make them at all competitive could run them two million credits at the least, but more likely upwards of eight. (She didn't like the look of that one dealer, felt shifty to her.) A few hundred thousand credits had _seemed_ like plenty of money a few days ago, but it was nowhere near enough. Wouldn't cover mercenaries to "crash the party" either. They would have to come up with the money somehow.

And that looked not at all promising. As one would expect, it wasn't exactly easy to make a million credits in under a week. Credits wouldn't be worth anything if it were. (Inflation was beginning to be a bit of a problem, actually, but wartime economies could be volatile.) She and Carth did have rather valuable skill sets, but the sort of people who _valued_ those skills, and would be willing to part with that many credits that quickly just to borrow them, tended to be found on the less than wholesome side of the law. Even then, that was iffy. If they _did_ hold down their gorge and sell their services to one criminal organization or another, she doubted that would be enough. Especially since those sorts of people would wait a bit for new associates to prove their trustworthiness before giving them the high-value jobs, they didn't have that kind of time.

Now that she thought about it, it seemed she knew quite a bit about how organized crime operated. That was...weird. Maybe she really _had_ been a con artist, or something of the like. That would explain a lot...

Of course, all this was assuming either of them could actually fly well enough to place in the race, putting them within reach of Shan. There was no guarantee of that. She knew how to fly a speeder — it'd felt natural enough when she'd stolen one to chase after the thugs who'd snatched Mission and Zaalbar — but she seriously doubted she was _that_ good. It didn't feel like a skill of hers. (Not that it was easy to predict what she'd be good at, these days.) Carth... _maybe_. He was a fighter pilot, which was hardly the same thing, but with a little luck he might be able to pull it off. When she'd floated the idea, he hadn't sounded _entirely_ confident, but confident enough for Cina to run with for now.

It wasn't like she had any better ideas, and it wasn't like it even mattered. Whether Carth was good enough of a flier to make it was a complete non-issue if they couldn't come up with a bike for him to fly, it was so much pissing in the wind. But they simply _didn't have the money_ , and it wasn't like she could just withdraw it from her expense account with—

Cina froze in the middle of the concourse, the skin at the back of her neck, all down her spine tingling, intense enough she had to fight a shudder. Slowly, she turned her head to her right, staring wide-eyed across the concourse at the bank of windows she'd just passed.

It was a bank. Well, not _really_ a bank — they were involved in all sorts of money-related things, from investment to insurance, but the word "bank" was accurate enough to be getting on with. SFS, Senathi Financial Services, she knew the name, they had branches all throughout the core. She'd never stepped foot in one, though. Alderaan had a public bank, she'd never had any reason to use a private one.

But...looking at the swooping green and blue curves of their logo, she felt... She knew it. Not just knew the name, she _knew_ it, it was _familiar_.

Cina rubbed her thumb against the pads of her fingers. Biometrics. Most private institutions used biometrics as identification for many secure transactions. Not usually as a first resort, but the option was certainly available if someone happened to be without any proof of who they were.

She was mad. This idea was completely mad.

The inside of the bank was all white and silver and green, the lights bright enough and every surface polished enough it almost hurt. There were a few well-dressed people about — she probably stuck out a bit, she hadn't bothered buying anything nice — but she didn't pay them any mind. She went straight for the counter, walking up to an available protocol droid, its frame gleaming intense enough it seemed to glow. "Good afternoon." No reason to be rude just because it was a droid, after all.

"Good afternoon, ma'am." The droid's simulated voice sounded vaguely feminine, smooth and pleasant. "How may I serve you today?"

Cina tried not to flinch at the use of the word "serve" — how obsequious people programmed droids had always made her uncomfortable. "I'd like to make a withdrawal."

"Of course. If you would please provide your member card, along with identification issued by any recognized authority."

She forced a wince, giving the droid a sheepish shrug. "Ah, I'm afraid I lost those. My arrival on Taris was...less than perfectly smooth." If _that_ wasn't an understatement...

"No matter. If you'd hold your hand out for me, please?" Even as it gently took her wrist, the droid reached under the counter, its hand reappearing with a rather clunky automatic hypo, the electronics attached to the thing making it more bulky than they usually were.

Cina felt an eyebrow tick up her face — honestly, genetic testing? SFS didn't fuck around.

"A slight prick." Cina didn't feel the high-end hypo pierce her skin at all, actually, the faint hiss of air released the only indication anything had happened. "There we are. One moment, please." The droid latched the hypo into a slot built into the counter, waited in companionable silence for the testing to finish. It didn't take long. The droid jerked, the first hint of emotion slipping into its voice, the barest sense of surprise. "Oh, my."

"Yes?"

"Apologies, my lady, but it seems there is a hold on your accounts."

Cina tried not to react to the honorific. Who the hell _was_ she? "What kind of hold?"

"Ah, according to our records, you are deceased. The administrator of your group has refused to consolidate your accounts — otherwise, they would have been closed months ago."

She blinked. "Well, as you can see, I am quite alive."

"Yes, I do apologize for the mistake, my lady. Give me a moment, and I will correct it."

While the droid went through whatever process was necessary to end the hold on her accounts — apparently they were still open, so it shouldn't take long — Cina tried to stop her feet from shifting, her fingers from tapping at the counter. She tried to not look too suspicious. She couldn't help the feeling some employee of the bank would find out what was going on here, and...

She didn't know, really. The droid's abrupt switch to honorifics meant for nobility was making her nervous. Seriously, who the hell _was_ she? She wavered for a moment, chewing on her lip, before deciding to not just come out and ask. Droids did tend to be less perceptive than biological beings, but it was still very possible it would notice how odd it was for her to ask what her own name was. And that would make any complications coming up _far_ more likely.

She'd rather not be arrested for impersonating herself, thanks.

That and... Well, she couldn't help the feeling that she didn't really want to know. She wasn't certain she'd be happy with what she learned.

She was far more comfortable with violence than she was...entirely comfortable with, and she realized how circular that was, yes. Previously, her only real exposure to violence (that she could remember) was through fiction. People always... It was a very common trope, in virtually everything she'd read or watched, that someone who found themselves in a position where they killed someone would, well, angst over it a bit. If they weren't a villain of some stripe, there would always be some sort of personal moral struggle, sometimes subdued, sometimes so powerful it overwhelmed the narrative and she honestly found it annoying.

There had been nothing. Cina didn't know how many people she'd killed by now — the fight in the _Endar Spire_ had gotten a bit fuzzy by the end, and rescuing Mission and Zaalbar, there had been too many explosions, too much fire and smoke, to be sure. There'd been a blank sort of shock, those first two soldiers she'd killed on the _Spire_ , but she'd just...settled into it. It'd become easy. Something she didn't have to think about, something she was, she was _good_ at. Something she was _used_ to.

She didn't think whoever she had been was _completely_ evil, no. "Cianen" certainly would have tried to help someone like Mission if she could, but going to the lengths she had... That had to be a holdover. Especially when slavery was involved. "Cianen" was _morally_ opposed to slavery, but it wasn't...personal, to her. There had never been any reason for it to be, it didn't _exist_ in the core, she'd never met a slave or even a former slave in her entire life. But now...

She wasn't just against slavery. She _hated_ it. Whenever she allowed herself to think about it, that it was happening _here_ of all places — not that she knew why that this was Taris specifically should bother her — she was overcome with a black, overwhelming rage, one that made it hard to think of little else. Part of her, a cold, vicious part of her, wanted to go to the Exchange, go to the Hutts, every property they held on this rotten planet, and utterly destroy them. Paint their halls with blood and consume them with fire, tear them apart piece by piece and rip them from the bedrock, until all that was left was a painful, but healing, scar.

The depth of her own hatred frightened her. She'd never felt this way about anything before.

But, however much she might despise slavery in particular, she did know quite a bit about how organized crime functioned. Enough that it couldn't just be from being taught about it (not that she remembered learning _that_ ). More concerning, it didn't really...bother her, that much. Some stuff, yes. Contract murders, for example — euphemistically referred to as "bounties" — were a grey area. Too often, unsavory people with connections would use a third party to eliminate someone who annoyed them, or the powerful would do it to cripple political opposition, but sometimes?

If she could find and pay enough assassins to wipe organizations like the Exchange out of existence, she would do it. If she could annihilate the boards of the more exploitative of the corporate conglomerates, she would do it. If she could remove the most authoritarian and regressive individuals throughout the Republic bureaucracy, she would do it. She'd have them all killed, in a heartbeat.

Some people, she felt, simply needed to die. And she didn't particularly care how it was done.

A lot of the day-to-day bread-and-butter of organized crime she didn't have any particular problem with. Most of them operated primarily on the production and distribution of controlled intoxicating substances, which, well, she wasn't entirely sure why they were controlled in the first place. Yes, some of them were dangerous — the critical word there being "some" — but she didn't see why it was the government's business to say which drugs people were allowed to have and which they weren't. A lot of shitty, exploitative nonsense happened around the fringes, true, but most of that wouldn't be necessary if these cartels weren't operating outside the law in the first place. These substances being illegal _created more suffering_ — the entire problem could be solved by legalizing them, then regulating the cartels like any other pharmaceutical company.

More often than not, the average person involved in organized crime did so out of desperation. The further away from the core, the harder life got. Out on the rim, the corporations controlled everything — the governments, the land, the markets, everything. Sometimes there weren't enough jobs to go around, and even the people who had them were often underpaid. (Or slaves, which was technically illegal for corporations licensed by the Republic, but it happened.) If the people needed to resort to theft and piracy to get by...well, Cina could understand that. It wasn't ideal, but the universe often wasn't.

At some level, this acceptance horrified her. That civilized coreworld academic part of her, it cringed at these sort of thoughts, it was just... But it was a quiet part of her, the smallest doubt, more confusing than it was controlling. Because, see, her entire life, everything she'd learned, everything she'd _believed_ , that enlightened, civilized view of reality _should_ be her primary influence, but...

The main problem was, Cina _liked_ who she was. She _liked_ Cianen Hayal. Her life wasn't perfect, of course, but whose was? She enjoyed her work, she enjoyed needling undergrads, she loved her family, and her friends. She was a bit opinionated, when it came to politics and such, but the Republic was less than perfect, especially these days — she had principles, okay, ethical principles, she couldn't help it. Her cousins thought she was a bit insufferable lately because of it, but she'd always thought _they_ were a bit simple and shallow, so that road went both ways.

She wasn't even certain her cousins actually existed. She was half-tempted to try to call her parents back at home, but that sounded like a bad idea. The Jedi probably had actors waiting around just in case. That would just be...uncomfortable.

But, she didn't think she would like who she used to be. The _my lady_ stuff, she had a theory percolating in the back of her head. Most core worlds that still had noble families were unlikely — Alderaan, Tepasi, Atrisia, core worlds were just too civilized for their nobles to slum about with criminals like she obviously had. Kuat was different though, she could be Kuati. Hapes was... _possible_ , but unlikely. (If for no other reason, she was too short to be Hapan.) Somewhere Tionese fit uncomfortably well.

The Tionese, and the Kuati to a lesser extent, tended to not have such a strong opinion about slavery, though. Not to mention, Cina _did_ have the wrong accent — Kuati and Tionese languages were related, and separate from the Alsakani–Shawkenese group. But there was an explanation for that. She _could_ have married into a less-than-reputable noble family. If it were Kuati, she could be from somewhere on the near Perlemian or the Shawken Spur. (The Kuati nobility were largely matrilineal, but while it was unusual it wasn't unheard of for a foreign woman to marry in, especially if she'd been born wealthy to begin with.) If it were Tionese, she could be from a little further out on the Perlemian — but not too far, the Alsakan character of the accent diminished quickly from Alderaanian influence.

Or perhaps, she was from the core, and had ended up being taken by slavers. There were far _fewer_ slavers active in the core, but it did still happen. They could have taken her out to the Tion Cluster, where slavery was legal. And she'd managed to crawl her way back up to respectability. Probably with a lot of violence along the way.

That would explain a lot. Her accent. Her familiarity with the languages of Hutt slave species. Her knowledge and partially ambivalent acceptance of organized crime, while at the same time passionately loathing slavery. The ease with which she killed. If she had somehow fallen in with a Tionese crime family, all of it made sense.

Except the more academic knowledge she had, anyway, but it could be from before she was taken, or the Jedi could have put that in there as part of the Cianen persona. That didn't disprove the theory.

And if she _was_ a Tionese noble... She didn't want to know. The Tionese were a bit...

If she was, she was _out_. She didn't want to go back.

She liked who she was now. Even if she scared hers—

"And how much would you like to withdraw today, my lady?"

Cina jumped, forced her attention back on the droid. How much _should_ she ask for? She had absolutely no idea how much money she had access to, or if whoever the "group administrator" was would be more likely to notice a larger sum vanishing. (Though, they'd likely notice the hold was taken off in any case, that might come back to bite her.) Having no better ideas, Cina closed her eyes, let out a slow, calming breath, emptied her head of thought as thoroughly as she could. Then she said the first thing that came to her, speaking from instinct. "Twenty million should do nicely, until I can get myself off-planet."

She had to hold back any reaction to the figure she'd just requested. Inflation had become something of a problem the last few years, but twenty million credits was still _a lot_ of money. It'd just seemed...natural, that she would be carrying around _twenty million credits_ in her pocket. That she'd need _twenty million credits_ just to put herself up until the blockade was lifted.

(Okay, that made the Tionese theory somewhat less likely — if she'd spent any time at all as a slave, she doubted she would be nearly so accustomed to extravagance as it sounded like she had been. The slightly less unpalatable Kuati theory was looking a little better now. Still.)

And, a few seconds later, the droid handed her the credit chits, divided into manageable denominations. Just like that.

Trying to look innocent, Cina promptly fled before they could change their minds.

Well. She guessed their money problems were solved for the foreseeable future. She should go ahead and pick up a suitable racing swoop while she was up here.

And a pilot. She'd just remembered where they might have a perfectly suitable one waiting for their call.

* * *

"We have a problem, Captain. Get up."

Asyr blinked at the human doctor, taking in the tension in his shoulders, the flickering of his eyes. "What kind of problem?"

"The Sith kind." Zelka dropped the cloth bag he was carrying onto a nearby counter, started loading it up with hypos and meal packs and bottles of water.

Oh. All right, then. Setting her borrowed datapad aside, Asyr tipped onto her feet — then winced as pain ripped through her left knee, radiating up her thigh, nearly taking her to the floor. Damn it. Holding back an angry sneer, she grabbed the cane leaning against the side of the bed, propped herself up to her full height. "I'm assuming you're sending me out the back." She held out the pad toward him.

He snatched the thing out of her hand, stuck it in the bag. "Yes. You don't know the area, I'll send— Kenna!" One of the nurses, a human girl who looked to be barely out of adolescence, jumped, turning to blink at Zelka. "Take this—" He tossed the bag at her, she caught it with a surprised _oof_. "—and take Captain Lar'sym out back. Take the stairs, find somewhere down a few levels to hole up. I'll call you as soon as the Sith are gone. If I _don't_ call you, the other two said they're somewhere near a cantina on the lower levels, it's marked on the map on the pad. Get her out of here. Go. Go!"

They didn't need to be told again. Kenna scrambled to Asyr's side, moving to take some of her weight, but Asyr waved her off, fighting the urge to snarl at her. (The girl _was_ just trying to help.) Asyr limped forward, leaning against the damn cane to take enough of the burden off her still healing knee it didn't protest too much. There was still a bit of twinging with every step, but not so much she couldn't walk. Just past the door out into the storerooms the girl caught up, leading the way through the maze of hallways and closets, bringing her to the rear end of the clinic.

They came out into a partially open-air alley, closed off above their heads but extending both sides to the end of the block. Over the noise of the city, Asyr picked out the thrum of heavy speeders, military grade — they probably only had minutes before Sith troops would be pouring into the alley to surround the clinic. Kenna swiped a card and punched a code into a keypad and a heavy door swung open, she led her inside before slamming it closed again. It was shockingly cold in here, a quick glance around revealed shelves and shelves of vials and samples, another storeroom for the clinic. Another door on the other side opened into a lab, unfamiliar machinery lining the walls, a handful of techs looking away from their work to blink up at them for just a second before turning away again. Kenna brought her across this one toward a hallway.

She immediately stopped, swiping her card again to open a narrow door just outside. They stepped into a maintenance access of some kind, small enough Asyr's limping gait brought her left shoulder bumping against pipes and ducts. The walked for a few more meters, coming to a narrow, twisting staircase, the grated metal making it partially transparent. With how tight it was, Asyr had a little trouble making it down, finally finding she could lean against the railing and lead with her left foot to take them with the least fuss.

She was still slow and awkward, though. She was trying to not feel too embarrassed about that.

Kenna led her down a few flights, through another maintenance shaft, and into a proper hallway. This place lacked the white and green theme of the medical complex Zelka worked out of, they must be out. They found a turbolift next, taking it down a few floors. Then Kenna led her through a few more halls, bringing her to—

Asyr blinked: they were walking into a cafe. A comparatively nice establishment, so far as such things on city worlds went, all woods and glass, everything smooth and clean, the air filled with the aromas of spices and breads and fruits and steeping caf. Kenna took a moment just inside, forcing her breath level. (Though, anyone observant would notice the sweat on her neck anyway.) And then she led Asyr up to the counter, smoothly rattled off her order to the droid there.

Okay...

A few minutes later had them sitting at one of the booths, Kenna with a drink of some kind and a pastry with far too much icing on it, Asyr with buns with nerf gravy and a bottle of water pulled from the bag. (She never had developed a taste for caf.) Asyr took a quick glance around before leaning over the table. "I thought we were going somewhere out of the way."

Kenna shrugged. "I doubt they're gonna search this far out, if they even search at all. And if they do, well, best look like we belong here, yeah?"

For a second she hesitated, but then nodded. She wouldn't know any better how to predict what the Sith would do in this sort of situation. This wasn't exactly her area of expertise — she was a pilot, she'd hardly ever fought on the ground, and had exactly zero experience in covert ops. So she pulled out her datapad and started scrolling through the news again, absently picking at her food.

The war had, of course, gone on without her. The Sith advance up the Perlemian had mostly been halted — despite a series of attacks over the last months, Tanaab hadn't yet fallen — but they were still eating away all throughout the Slice. Revan's plan, she knew, had been to pin most of the Republic fleet at the front lines on and around the Perlemian, while working her way through the Slice and all the way around the core to Yag'Dhul. She would block all the major trade routes from the core rimward, effectively splitting the Republic in two so it could be picked apart at her leisure. While her subordinates tied down the Republic by nipping away at systems in her wake, Revan had thrust through the mid-rim, the opening moves of the encirclement that would ultimately choke the Republic to death.

Fortunately, she'd been assassinated before she could get very far — Nanth'ri had signed a treaty to join the Sith just the week before. Ever since Revan's death, the Sith assault had been rather less focused, seemingly just blasting away at targets at random. But the border had still managed to crawl as far as Daalang.

Daalang was only a couple short hops away from Bothawui.

Luckily, so far as she could tell, the Sith had been making no moves to attack her people directly. Perhaps they didn't want to antagonize the Hutts — they'd remained mostly neutral in the war, but if the Sith kept gobbling up systems so close to their borders that might change. Perhaps they simply couldn't spare the necessary forces at the moment — hers was a martial people, they were more well-prepared for an invasion than most.

Perhaps Malak was simply too unbalanced to focus on the threat to his south long enough to deal with it. It was impossible to tell.

Revan, at least, acknowledged her people for the power they were. She'd heard rumors she'd tried to negotiate an alliance in the opening weeks of the war — and nearly succeeded, at that — and her planned invasion corridor neatly cut them off from the Republic without having to fight them directly. Malak, on the other hand, was a fucking idiot, and clearly had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

Honestly, she couldn't imagine how anyone could stomach following him. Aliens, sometimes...

They couldn't even have been waiting for an hour when Kenna's com started pinging. She twitched, letting out a startled _eep_ , scrambling for the thing. "Doctor Forn? Are they gone?"

Asyr snorted. She certainly _hoped_ they were gone — if anyone were listening in, that would be a very suspicious thing to open a conversation with.

"Oh, good. We'll be back in a few minutes."

"Actually, I thought it was about time I go down to find the Captain and the Professor." She'd been stuck in the clinic for more than long enough, she felt. At this point, she probably wasn't quite recovered enough to be of much use, but she still hated sitting around doing nothing. She'd be fine in a day or two, it was time to move on.

"Um..." The girl stared at her for a moment, wide-eyed. "Captain says she wants to go find the others." There was a short pause as she listened to Forn — she had the directional audio on, Asyr couldn't hear a thing. After a second, she gave the com a baffled sort of look, turning up to her again. "Ah, actually, one of your friends is up there right now. Cianen, was it? Apparently she was coming to pick you up. The Sith freaked her out a little, I think."

Asyr huffed. Having to backtrack _would_ be a bit annoying, but she might as well. She didn't know _exactly_ where she and Onasi had set up shop, after all. "Fine. Tell them we're coming." She twisted out of her seat, started limping for the door.

The girl led her back to the clinic along a much quicker, more direct route, taking a single lift all the way up. If she had to guess, she'd been concerned the Sith would have thought to cordon off the main thoroughfares, so she'd taken the sneaky way around. Which Asyr could only be slightly grateful for — she had the feeling getting up stairs on a cane would be harder than down them.

When she stepped back into the main room of the clinic, coming in through the back again, she froze, staring around with wide eyes. Everyone who had been in the tanks, every one, were laid out on the beds, bits of orange gel still clinging to hair and fur in a few places. They were still, but not with the stillness of a coma. No, every single one was dead.

"What happened?"

"The bloody Sith happened." Doctor Forn was suddenly standing at her side, cold fire in his eyes. "The officer wanted to interrogate them, but when I said they were all unlikely to wake up, he ordered me to euthanize them all. He watched me do it, refused to leave until it was done." And Forn wasn't taking it well, his clawless hands clenched at his hips, shaking with suppressed rage.

Asyr opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. Civilians didn't think of death in the same terms. She and Onasi would have to get off-planet, as soon as possible. They wouldn't have recovered in time to come with. Even if Forn could get them up and moving again somewhere down the line, the Sith would be here to collect them.

She'd heard stories of how prisoners of war were treated under Malak. It was better they were dead.

And there was Cianen, shooting her a crooked smile. "Well, look who's up and walking again. Getting cooped up yet? Feel like getting out of here?"

"Yes." She hissed the word out before Forn could say anything — and it did look like he'd been about to. It took a few minutes, suffering the human doctor's warnings to go easy on her knee for a couple weeks, thanking him again for his help. Cianen slipped him a credit chit at some point, waved off his protests, and then they were gone, stepping out onto the concourse just out the front door.

"This might be uncomfortable." Spoken in a whisper, Cianen's accent was rather less noticeable. She sidled a bit closer, taking her arm, started leading her slowly off to the right. "The humans up here a bit xenophobic, I'm afraid. Just, let me do the talking, and try not to scare anyone too much."

Asyr wanted to be annoyed at the suggestion, but she was probably right. The less enlightened humans did tend to find people like her frightening. "I shall try to contain my wounded pride." She wasn't sure the sarcasm was noticeable.

"Mm." Cianen rolled her narrower shoulder into her a bit — if she had to guess, suggesting Asyr could lean on her a bit if she had to. At least she was being subtle about it. Not that Asyr was even certainly Cianen _could_ take her weight, she was such a tiny little thing. "By the way, the battle conductor is alive. We're working on a plan to get her back."

It took her a second to work out what Cianen was talking about. When she did, Asyr stumbled, her wrist turning about her cane nearly taking her to the ground. Whisper turning into a harsh hiss, she said, " _What?_ You're certain it's her?"

"Yes. We got the information off some locals, it's good."

"Tell me everything."

Cianen started at the very beginning, waking up in Forn's clinic. Claiming an apartment in the lower city, winning a sabaac tournament, rescuing a couple locals from slavers, winning their loyalty in the process — something to do with this Zaalbar's home culture, it wasn't entirely clear — getting in with one of the swoop gangs so they could be there when Shan was handed off. They had to get a speeder bike and fly in the race, do well enough they would be in the winner's circle at the end. Winning outright would be ideal, of course, but just being close enough to interrupt the exchange would do.

The whole time, Asyr just stared at the top of her head, blankly frowning to herself. Cianen couldn't have done all that. She was too...well, soft. She was a tiny little thing, she– She was a _university professor!_ What in the Black was she doing, running around and lighting up gangsters, talking about starting a flaming turf war just so they could nab Shan and get away clean...

But she _was_ different. It was hard to put words to it. She was dressed differently, of course, her clothes would have gone up with the _Spire_. Rough leather and synthweave, looked like a down-on-her-luck spacer more than anything. An impression the battery packs at her hips and the blaster in the holster at the small of her back fit with perfectly.

Even the way she walked was different. It was subtle, but there, her gait steadier, sharper. And her voice, harder, lower. And she still smiled at her the same, a corner of her peculiar soft mouth curling with dark humor, but something about it was...

"You're not Cianen Hayal."

The smile faded, flickering down to nothing. "I'm the same person you met on the _Spire_. It's just... Well, it's complicated. Ever since I hit my head during the battle... I think the Jedi rebuilt my mind at some point. I have no idea who I am.

"So anyway, how do you feel about checking out some swoop bikes?"

Asyr wanted to ask. How was she supposed to leave a comment like that alone, she'd have to be someone quite else to not be a _little_ curious. But it was more than clear Cianen didn't want to talk about it. Which was perfectly understandable, she doubted she'd want to be interrogated about that either, if it were her.

They'd still be having a conversation about it later, of course.

* * *

Hapes — _In canon, the Hapes Consortium developed during a period of isolation after the destruction of the Lorell Raiders around 4050 BBY, a century before KotOR. However, I'm not certain the history of Hapes makes sense, for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, it's a little close to the core to just be conveniently forgotten/ignored for a few thousand years. I'm pushing their origin back eight to ten thousand years, to make their being permitted to develop their own new society in isolation more believable. This means they do exist in the KotOR era, and people know they exist, but they're fiercely isolationist, so have little to do with the outside galaxy. (They wouldn't be the only people like that, there are a few independent states here and there.)_

Captain — _The observant might have noticed that Carth and Asyr both have the same rank, despite Carth being Asyr's commanding officer. The full explanation is complicated, but essentially Carth's responsibilities on this particular task force reflect a higher rank than he actually holds, largely due to his reputation and the Jedi rearranging things as they please to put someone they trust in charge. They can do whatever they like with how the task force is actually run, but they can't just make Carth a general because they say so. (It also doesn't help that Asyr was loaned from an allied force, that tends to complicate things.)_

* * *

 _I'm sure Cina withdrawing twenty million credits from that particular account will have absolutely no unintended consequences whatsoever._

 _A little longer getting around to it this time, I know. Been trying to work on a collaborative HP project with LeighaGreene._ (All According to Plan _posted under LysandraLeigh.) Also still getting distracted by other projects, so delays of a few weeks now and then aren't unlikely. I am focusing on this more than any other of my solo projects, so it shouldn't get too bad._

 _Next chapter is about something completely different. Two more Taris chapters after that, and we're moving on to Dantooine._

 _Until next time,  
~Wings_


	8. Revanche — I

It barely took twelve hours for Cina to change her mind.

She'd woken up at an unreasonably early hour of the morning, it would be ages before the other two got up. Getting back to sleep had proven impossible — every time she closed her eyes, she found waiting for her a black void, sinking into her bones, drawing her deeper, deeper.

Every time she closed her eyes, she felt so _tired_.

So she'd brewed some caf, set herself up at the table with her datapad. The caf was, for once, _not_ completely horrible. She'd gotten a new machine yesterday, and why not, she had the credits now. Carth had been more than a little surprised when Asyr had shown up at the Bek base on a gleaming new swoop bike, Cina close behind her in an air speeder loaded up with supplies to last out the rest of their stay on Taris. Supplies that included _real food_ for a change.

He'd been uneasy with how she'd gotten the credits to pay for it all, of course, but by now she expected Carth to winge whenever she solved one of his problems for him.

She was sitting at the table for maybe five minutes, paging randomly through news on the net, when she finally decided there was no use in continuing to pretend she wasn't thinking about something else. She'd thought she was okay with not knowing, she'd put it off, but now...

The credit chits wouldn't have her real name attached to them, but they _would_ have the account number. She pulled up the card-reader, scanned one of the chits. It took a second to spot the account number in the page of information spat at her, though calling it a "number" was rather misleading — it was a three part code, eight characters then twenty-four then four, using numbers and letters pulled from the entire Republic standard character set. It was the first eight she wanted: that would be the planet code, identifying where the account had first been opened. She copied it with a couple taps, switched over to track down a node she could look it up at.

Though she did note the four-character code at the end, the account number: "1LES". Even as her fingers moved with little input from her, she mulled over that particular sequence. Account numbers were _usually_ random, but they _could_ be chosen by the group administrator. It was most likely, she thought, that those were the first three letters of her real name.

Which didn't narrow it down at all, of course. Judging by her own accent, she'd expect her name to be Alsakani; the old Alsakani languages were rather phonologically simple; there were comparatively few possible girl's names, and trillions of people of Alsakani descent, so they were all used thousands upon thousands of times. There was no such thing as a rare Alsakani name. _Les-_ could be Lesa, Lesushi, Lesane, Lesami, Lesika, Lesoli, Lesuva, even _Leth-_ names were possible too, they were classically spelled _Lest-_ — the point was, there were a _lot_ of options. There were _millions_ of human women with names that started with those three letters.

She copied the planet code into the search bar, the result popping up an instant later: _Shawken_.

She was from Shawken. Or, at least, the group _had been opened_ on Shawken. There was no way of knowing whether she was actually form there or not. She might have just—

No...

No, she was remembering something. It was called... What was it called? Mase... Maselai? Mashilai?

" _Are you going to mope in here the whole time?"_

Mathilnai. It was Mathilnai. Shawken was an old world, one of the Core Founders, the cities long since spread to overwhelm the entire globe. Save for a few places, here and there — portions of the natural world had been preserved, so well as was possible on an ecumenopolis. Near the tropics, along the shore of a great sea (now hidden from above by endless metropolis) stretched one of these protected zones, containing a resort destination, a beach. It was called Mathilnai.

" _I'm not moping. I'm reading."_

Cina rubbed at the side of her head, despite how useless she knew it was. The dull ache at her left temple wasn't going to go away just from poking at it.

Her family had had a vacation home, in a town just south of the beach. They'd...

There was a library, there. An _old_ library, or at least an old-fashioned one. There were some datacards, but many of the shelves had been filled with books, _hundreds_ of books, some so old the leather covers were creased, dust gathered on the pages. She remembered, she...

The last time she'd been there, there'd been... Something had been wrong. She'd spent most days hidden away in the library, she hadn't wanted to go out. She was afraid people would know, and if people knew, her parents would get upset again, and...

And her cousin Desa didn't understand, he didn't know, he, he just wanted her to come out and play with them, the rest of them, like she usually did. (How old had she been? Eight? Nine?) And she hadn't wanted to think about it, she wanted to forget about it, read until she forgot, she wanted to be left alone, she just wanted him to _go away_ —

 _ **It**_ _came again, without her meaning to, and she was suddenly too full, like breathing in steam, but far more than her lungs could handle, making her feel hot, and light, and bigger than she was. And then it was pushing out of her, without her meaning to, the lamp was whipped off its stand, crashing against the ceiling, Desa was thrown back, tumbling over, fetching against a bookshelf—_

 _And Desa was crying, scared more than hurt, Father looked even more scared, telling her she had to be careful, she had to keep it_ _ **in**_ _, but she_ _ **couldn't**_ _, he didn't understand, it was too_ _ **big**_ _, when it came she couldn't hold it, she was getting so_ _ **tired**_ _of holding it inside—_

Cina frowned.

Slowly, cautiously, her free hand moved to her waist. She flipped the top off one of the leather pouches there, the longest one. And she pulled out the thin, metal tube inside.

She held a dead Jedi's lightsaber in her hand, staring at it, her thoughts moving thick and sluggish.

She'd read about Jedi, of course. What child didn't, at some point or another? Jedi trained in the use of lightsabers, but while the technology involved was comparatively simple nobody else used them, for any purpose. They were surprisingly unwieldy, see. The "blade", for lack of a better term, was essentially weightless, but ionized — it moved too easily, but at the same time it pushed and pulled against the air, nearby objects, in subtle but unpredictable ways. Ordinary people who got their hands on one more often than not ended up accidentally cutting off something important.

But Cina...

It felt natural, holding this exotic weapon in her hand. It'd felt natural, pulling it out to carve through the ceiling into this apartment. (Ignore for the moment that she _had_ almost accidentally cut off something important, that was from the ceiling collapsing, not the lightsaber itself.) It'd felt natural, slicing off the binders restraining Mission and Zaalbar.

She'd essentially used a plasma cutter within _millimeters_ of their unprotected skin. And she'd just...done it. She hadn't even thought about it, just, _snap-hiss-slice-slice_ , done.

Somehow, it hadn't struck her until just now how completely absurd that was.

Also? When she'd been a child, she could _move things with her mind_.

She...

Son of a bitch. Mission _had_ had her there.

 _Cina was a bloody Jedi_.

...

Well. She certainly wasn't getting back to sleep _now_.

* * *

" _He still thinks he can buy me."_

 _Noshev's breath froze in his throat, choking on the chill on the air. It wasn't a_ literal _chill — the bare little ready room he'd been led to after docking with the_ Vindicta _was a little colder than he was fully comfortable with, but it wasn't any worse than it'd been a moment ago. It wasn't a chill on the air, but one on Lesami's voice, in her eyes, staring back at him without any expression, any life at all._

 _In the blink of an eye, she wasn't his sister anymore, and Noshev was alone in a room with an unhappy Dark Lord of the Sith._

 _It took a moment for him to clear his throat, shake off his unease enough to speak. "Forgive me, Your Excellency—" Noshev was a little proud of himself, for remembering to use her newly-assumed title, he hadn't slipped and said her name once. "—but I'm afraid I haven't been clear. This isn't a, a bribe. Our father wishes to—"_

" _Cumal po lai Revas hasn't been my father for a long time." The words were still wreathed in ice, but there was less anger beneath them, something more...exasperated, exhausted._

 _Noshev tried not to wince — he shouldn't have said that, he'd known Lesami had had some unspoken issue with their parents for...well, as long as he could remember, honestly. Apparently, he had to watch his pronouns too. "_ My _father, he doesn't intend to, to— His offer of an alliance is genuine. He has spoken with like-minded people of influence all throughout the core, and they all agree that—"_

"People of influence _," she drawled, her voice black and thick with disdain. "Even in your diction, you betray the fundamental character of this..._ proposal _." This last word was said in a faint snarl, her lips curling with disgust. "I get the feeling you're not very good at this, my lord."_

 _He could only meekly shrug. However peculiar it was to hear his elder sister of all people call him that, she was nowhere wrong. He meant, he was a bloody music student, he didn't have the training to negotiate what was essentially a treaty with a foreign head of state. Father had chosen to send him because they'd always gotten along — no matter how many years it'd been since they'd actually met and however young he'd been at the time — but he was thinking that had been misguided._

 _It had started before he'd been born, but he'd long learned there were decades of ill will between Lesami and their family. Perhaps someone she wasn't actually related to would have been a better choice for an envoy._

 _Noshev took a long breath, pushing back the hot anxiety itching at his throat as best he could. "I'm afraid I don't understand, Your Excellency."_

" _No, you wouldn't. It's quite clear House Reva has no idea what I'm trying to accomplish here." Lesami pushed herself to her feet, stalked over to the window overlooking the bustling docking bay. As the vids leaked from her nascent Empire had suggested, Lesami didn't usually wear the full Revan getup — this looked much like a navy admiral's uniform, though cast in the silver-black Sith colour scheme, extra gold and white accents here and there the only concessions to the fact that she was essentially the queen of a thousand worlds now. She didn't even wear the mask most of the time, from their guesswork only donning it for certain formal occasions and when she expected a fight._

 _Of course, she was still intimidating enough without all that — he didn't miss the lightsaber hanging at each hip._

" _I'm not surprised, of course." Lesami's arms lifted to fold over her chest, her shoulders rising and falling in a harsh scoff. "He's always thought he could buy me. My forgiveness, my love." Noshev winced at the derision thick on the air. "And now my mercy."_

 _The word, the way it was said — softly, casual, as though she were commenting on something inconsequential — had a shiver running down his spine. "It's not like that, Lesami."_

" _But it_ is _, Noshev." He winced — he hadn't noticed he'd used her name. She looked back at him over her shoulder, face still eerily blank, her eyes cold and heavy. "It's been this way since I was thirteen. He threw money at me back then, hoping it would soften me toward him, assuage his own guilt. I took it, of course — it was money, and they don't exactly pay Jedi — but he didn't get what he wanted from me. So he sent me more, and more, and more, invited me to vacations and weddings, theatres and dinners packed with the society elite of the core, trying to find something that would buy me. And he still does it, he never bloody gives up._

" _And now?" Without a gesture from her, without even a glance, the datapad on the table, the beginnings of a contract still sketched across the display, gently lifted into the air. "He and all his wealthy and powerful friends hope to get out in head of the coming revolution. They know I'll win, ultimately, and they think they can bribe their way into my favour, by my good will preserve their assets and their influence. Perhaps I'll even offer them new opportunities to acquire greater power and wealth._

" _But if these blind fools think I can be bought, they have catastrophically misread me. I have only one response to this_ offer _." Her right eye twitched, just slightly._

 _The datapad erupted in an explosion of hissing and cracking, sparks flying to pour against the table. Noshev jumped to his feet and scrambled back, nearly tripping over the legs of the chair, even as the pad exploded, shards clattering down to the table, the air filling with the acrid smell of overheated electronics. His hand came unconsciously to his chest, heart pounding painfully against his ribs._

" _There will be no alliance."_

 _Noshev jumped — he'd been so busy with the exploding datapad he hadn't noticed Lesami move. She was standing right in front of him now, less than a foot away. Now that she was so close he could feel it, a charge on the air, like standing too close to an energy shield, the taste of a lightning storm undercut with encroaching cold, ice pressing lightly against his skin. He moved to back away a step, but her eyes narrowed in a glare, and he was frozen in place, his limbs refusing to move, he couldn't even look away._

" _If your lord thinks there ever_ could _be an accord between us, he terribly misunderstands the foundational principles of this institution. When I do conquer the core — and make no mistake, your vaunted Republic cannot and will not stop me — he and his ilk will see their fortunes change quite considerably. If they are lucky, they will get out of it with their lives. House Reva would be wise to not expect special treatment."_

 _Her hand came up, clenching tight around his lapel, just under his throat. If he could run, if he could cry out, but he couldn't, he couldn't_ move _, he could barely breathe. Sweat pouring down his face, his limbs going numb with terror, he didn't even notice his feet had left the ground. Lesami dragged him across the room, shortly coming to the door. It hissed open on its own, she hadn't reached for the controls, revealing the sterile grey hallway beyond, the line of soldiers and pair of unfamiliar Jedi that had escorted him from his ship an hour ago._

 _With a contemptuous flick of her wrist, Noshev was dropped stumbling into the hall, his shaky legs quickly failing him, stumbling to his hands and knees on the hard metal floor. "The Lord wishes to return home. Escort him back to his ship."_

 _A moment later, before one of the Sith soldiers had pulled him to his feet, the air had warmed what felt like ten degrees, the deadly electricity surrounding him swiftly fading away. Lesami had left._

 _Noshev let out a breath of relief, even to his ears the sigh sounding far too much like a whimper._

* * *

"Mister Nallas? He's ready for you now. Go on in."

Popping smoothly back to his feet, Yani gave his client's assistant a smile. It felt rather more brittle than normal.

With a final girding breath, he walked through the door, bringing himself immediately face-to-face with Cumal po lai Revas. "Yani, good to see you as always." The man firmly clasped his hand with both of his, lined face splitting with a grin. Cumal was about a decade older than Yani, his age thinly showing around his eyes and lips, a few streaks of silver shot through brown hair. But his dark eyes were still sharp, his grip strong.

"Thank you, my lord, you as well."

His client's eyes narrowed in a false glare. "How long have we known each other? _Cumal_ , please." The grin returned, so abruptly he'd think it had never left. "I don't mean to suggest you're unwelcome, but, forgive me, I thought our monthly meeting was next week. Sashaiva didn't go over her limit again, did she?"

"No, nothing like that." Yani hesitated for a second. "There's been a...development. I thought you should know, in case, ah, there's any response you wanted to make."

"Oh, yes, pick a seat, then."

This office, after so many years working with Cumal, had become intimately familiar. The floors covered in thick carpet a rich blue, the walls dark wood and gleaming chrome, interrupted here and there with framed stills and certificates and tall bookshelves — holding _actual books_ , the Revas were famous eccentrics in that way. Just behind the slightly disheveled-looking desk was an entire wall of window, looking out over the glimmering spires of Elumanai, luxury housing all red brick and silver and creeping green as far as the eye could see, air speeders zipping between the peaks as quick and confident as birds through a forest.

Closer to the door was a circle of plush armchairs around a low table of metal and glass, strewn with a few data and sketchpads. Also, he noticed, a coloring book and a handful of pastels — one of Cumal's grandchildren must have been by recently. Yani settled into one of the chairs, setting his bag down at his side.

"I don't suppose I could talk you into taking a brandy this time."

Yani _did_ actually consider it, but only for a second. "Ah, no, thank you, not this time." He was trying to hide his anxiety, and holding a drink would just make it far too obvious. Even digging into his bag for his pad he was having far more trouble than he should, his fingers shaking, clumsy enough he kept fumbling the folders as he paged through them.

"Too professional by half, you are. There's nothing wrong with relaxing now and again."

For perhaps the hundredth time, Yani shrugged off the sentiment. He _did_ know how to relax, of course — _Cumal po lai Revas_ , of all people, simply wasn't someone he was entirely comfortable around.

Cumal sank into a seat across from him with a light sigh. He leaned back, crossing his feet on the corner of the table, and paused to take a sip from the snifter of brandy in his hand before speaking. "Well, as you are so determined to get on to business. What did you have for me, Yani?"

"You may wish to..." He trailed off, biting at his lip. His fingers tapped idly at the edges of his pad, and it took some concentration to stop his knee from bouncing. He had absolutely no idea how this conversation was going to go. "I mean, this is... It may come as a bit of a shock. Just a forewarning."

That just seemed to make Cumal more interested. At least a shade of severity had entered his expression, the reckless grin swapped for something more quiet, attentive. Even he could take some things seriously when called for. "Consider my breath bated." Or maybe not...

It took a few attempts for him to actually say it. The content wasn't the problem, but the monumental implications of what he was about to say, that was what had the words lock in his throat, so hard he felt he could barely breathe. Eventually, after an embarrassingly long moment, he got it out. "You were right. She's alive."

Cumal hardly reacted. He stared at Yani, long and hard, so still he hardly seemed alive, more like a statue made in his likeness. Finally he blinked, slowly, his lips parted. "You're certain."

Despite the grievousness of the situation, he still felt the shot to his professional pride. "Her primary account was accessed from a branch office on Taris. Her identity was confirmed through a genetic test. Here, I had a still ripped off the security feed." He blew the picture up until it filled the screen, slid the pad across the table.

And Cumal went completely still again, staring at the image — a human woman from the waist up, dressed in cheap, faded clothes, dirty and bruised, hidden weaponry conspicuously hinted at by the power cells clipped to her belt. He stared, for long moments. Then he turned, slowly, toward his desk, the collection of stills propped up there. Holos of his family.

It wasn't visible from here, but Yani remembered the holo he was probably thinking of. A young woman, sixteen or seventeen, dark hair let out in graceful waves, one arm thrown around the shoulders of a slightly older man, both of them caught in a storm of laughter, pinking faces overcome with matching grins. It was the last time, to his knowledge, that Cumal's daughter had ever set foot on Shawken, over fifteen years ago now. She'd been lovely, of course, the fine white and blue dress perfectly chosen, looking for anything like an ordinary girl, innocent and harmless.

Though even back then she'd been anything but. Look closely under her arm and there was a noticeable bulge, not quite hidden by the folds of her dress. Apparently, she'd been unwilling to set aside her lightsaber even long enough to attend her brother's wedding.

It'd been years now, and he still hadn't gotten used to the idea. He didn't know what to do with the fact that his most valuable client's only daughter just so happened to be Revan. _The_ Revan. Honestly, he tried to pretend Lesami po si Revas and Revan were two completely different people. If only for the sake of his continued sanity.

"I knew it." Cumal was smiling, a thin, crooked sort of smile, a soft note of humor on his voice. "I bloody knew it. Told you the whole time, didn't I? Two Jedi were supposed to have finished her? No, I didn't believe it for a second. There's nobody yet who's gotten one over on my Lesami."

That wasn't entirely true — despite how the legend that had formed around Revan during the War had made it sound, it had been a bit touch and go for a little while there. As Supreme Commander, Revan _had_ lost battles. Fewer and fewer as the War had gone on, true, likely because she'd learned to pick them better. But even toward the end, fighting against the Republic, she hadn't been infallible. The Sith _had_ been pushed back, a few times. Granted, not very often and never for very long, but _still_.

And he did have to admit he'd never heard of Revan even being injured, before Deralia. But if she had been, the Republic and later the Sith probably would have covered it up. There was power in a reputation like hers, after all.

He knew all that rationally but, he had to admit, when Cumal had refused to close her accounts, claiming to believe she was still alive no matter what the Republic or the Sith said, part of him had acknowledged the point. She... Well, she was _Revan_. With the stories he'd heard of her exploits against the Mandalorians, it _was_ hard to believe a single Jedi Master and a half-trained apprentice (at the time) could possibly manage to kill her. It was childish, silly, but he'd heard too much, Cumal had been so certain, Yani hadn't been able to shake the thought he might be right.

Turned out, that irrational belief in her ability to survive against all odds had been entirely correct.

"What is she _doing_ , though?" Cumal picked up the pad, frowning down at the security still. "Dressed like that... Well, I'd almost think she's trying to keep it secret, that she's still alive. But if she is, I'd think she'd be smart enough not to withdraw twenty million credits from an account under her real name."

Yani shrugged. "I really couldn't say. Desperation, perhaps? Taris was recently put under a total blockade. She might not have intended to be stuck there."

"Mm." For a few seconds longer, Cumal stared at the image of his definitely-not-dead daughter, brandy idly swirling in one hand. "Well," he said, sliding the pad back across the table, "I'll be wanting to open a new line of credit. Private, attached to one of the external group numbers."

"Can I ask what for?"

"If we didn't get wind of it before, Lesami's obviously travelling under a pseudonym. I don't have any way to contact her, I don't know what she has planned, so if I want to make contact again I'll have to pay a professional to do it for me." With a crooked smile, shoulders lifting in a light shrug, he said, "The last communication we had was...well, less than civil."

Yani almost had to snort at that. When she'd returned at the head of the Sith, Cumal had tried to make contact several times, offering his support (and the family's wealth and influence) in her revolution she had going on. She never responded, so he'd sent one of his sons into then-newly-declared Sith space.

Noshev _had_ gotten a one-on-one meeting with her, but it hadn't gone well. Apparently, he'd said something to make Revan quite angry — by the way he'd spoken of it, there'd been a moment he'd been certain his sister was about to kill him.

"But, things are quite different now. Maybe it'll go better this time." Cumal said it lightly, on the edge of bouncing, a hopeful tone that rang only slightly false.

Yani was even less confident than he was. He didn't know exactly what their disagreement was about, he hadn't considered it his business, but it didn't really matter, in the end. He just had to remember Noshev's face when he'd described his encounter with her to know there was little chance of an easy reconciliation.

But he didn't bother saying anything. Cumal would do what he felt like, no matter what Yani said. As he always did.

* * *

 _The second she walked in the door, Saul knew something was wrong._

 _He couldn't claim to have known Lesami very well or for very long. They'd first met a little less than a year ago now, when the irritatingly overconfident Jedi had appeared at the frontlines, explained to him her whole Revan scheme, asked for his cooperation. It'd sounded ludicrous at the time, but he'd agreed anyway. While the Order had been stingy as hell she'd brought a dozen Jedi with her, so putting up with her eccentricities had seemed like a small price to pay for the mystical assistance._

 _Of course, by now he realized her confidence was mostly justified._

 _More than her posture or her gait — it was hard to pick up much through her ridiculous Revan armor anyway — it was a feeling on the air. A subtle intensity, a sharpness, a sense of imminent violence, motion restrained. Like a caged predator, Saul had the sense not to go poking at her._

 _Lesami took a few even steps across the living room of her apartment, stopping to stare out the long bank of windows overlooking the capital district. She stood there, still and silent, for long moments._

" _So, how did it go?" Saul had to hold back the childish urge to shush Grethar — just because he knew not to go poking at her didn't mean everybody was so cautious._

 _Her fists clenched at her sides, a long, hissing breath leaked out from behind her mask. Then she was whipping it off her face, turned and threw it away from her, spinning through the air so quickly it was but a blur, clanging to rest out of sight in the kitchen. Breaths coming thick and heavy, she kicked over one of the little side tables, the pot softly dropping to the carpet. Until she kicked that too, the ceramic pot shattering as her boot struck it, dirt scattering across the previously pristine white carpet, peculiar red-purple leaves torn and dying. Leaning half over, gloved fingers burying themselves her hair, she let out a frustrated scream._

 _Saul could_ feel _it, itching at his ears and battering him over the head. Before he could consider whether he should be doing anything, Alek was already on his feet and across the room. In a blink they were holding each other, whispering, Saul couldn't tell what from here._

 _He pretended not to notice the more suggestive signs of affection. He knew full well what was forbidden to Jedi, and he personally thought it idiotic. It was easier to cover for them if he claimed not to know anything._

 _Sounding a bit unsettled, Grethar said, "I guess that means it went badly."_

 _Saul shot him a look. "You always were perceptive, Marshal."_

" _Go to hell, Karath."_

" _Don't you two start again." Lesami was walking toward the circle of armchairs alone, Alek having disappeared somewhere. She let her ridiculous cloak drop to the floor, sank into one of the open chairs, pulling off her gloves finger by finger. Her brow was furrowed, more obviously drawn with exhaustion than usual. "I'm really not in the mood for your bickering right now."_

 _Saul felt an eyebrow twitch. Lesami might be becoming increasingly important to the war effort, but the both of them still outranked her by quite a bit — anybody else talking to him like that would see consequences for it. Not that he was actually offended, it was just amusing._

 _Besides, at this point Saul was only her superior officer as a formality. She'd been the one giving him orders for months now._

 _Forcing his voice light, casual, he asked, "So, I suppose they didn't take it seriously?"_

" _Of course not. Bloody idiot senators," she muttered sulkily. (Her tone almost put a smile on his face — he forgot how young she was sometimes.) "They didn't believe a fucking word. So certain the Mandoade will stick to the Perlemian and the Hydian, that the fleets at Corsin and Taanab are enough to hold them out of the core. I_ tried _to point out Onderon is only a few short hops from Zeltros, where they could easily hit_ all the southern core _, but did they listen? Nooo..."_

 _Grethar cursed under his breath in his native tongue, his shaggy head shaking. "Well, what did you expect? Civilians are idiots."_

 _Nodding along, Saul said, "There really should be a service requirement to sit on the Defense Committee."_

" _That'll never happen." Lesami let out a harsh, dismissive scoff, her lips curling. "You know the kind of people who become senators, right?"_

" _They're your kind of people." Alek had reappeared with a steaming mug of something, handing it to Lesami before heading back for his seat. He wasn't_ entirely _wrong, there — Saul knew Lesami had been born to a ludicrously wealthy noble family. How else could a Jedi afford a private apartment on the upper levels of Galactic City?_

 _Both hands wrapped around the mug, Lesami glared through the steam at the other Jedi. "I wouldn't say that. But I do know these people. I doubt there's anyone on that blasted committee who understands the strategic situation as we do. Bloody idiots are going to hand the Mandoade the core, and blame us for fumbling the war afterwards, just you wait."_

" _No, they won't. They're war leaders: the Mandos will execute them all. Won't have the breath to go blaming anyone."_

" _Shut up, Alek, you know what I mean."_

 _Saul paused for a moment, turning the thought over in his mind. A glance at Grethar showed a similarly contemplative look on his face — at least, he thought so, he'd never gotten particularly good at reading alien expressions. He hesitated another moment. It was a rather...extreme course of action. The political consequences if they failed could be catastrophic. And the precedent it would set if they_ succeeded...

 _With a last girding look shared with Grethar, Saul cleared his throat. "Grethar, a few of our colleagues, and myself have been looking into a solution for our...organizational issues. I doubt we could get everything arranged in time to prevent the Mandos from getting into the core, but maybe, just maybe, we'll at least be able to push them out."_

 _Lesami blinked. "I can't imagine how you'll manage that. The Ministry is the problem, and with Sek-shoral at the top — who makes a bloody political appointee Supreme Commander during a war, honestly..."_

 _There was nothing Saul could say to defend Sek-shoral — he didn't disagree, the man was a liability. "We identified the same problem. He's tying one hand behind our backs, forcing us to fight on the defensive against an enemy that holds no quarter. It's a political calculation and nothing but: How many lives and credits are these rim worlds worth, to his ilk? This war will see us all dead at this rate, inevitably. But, we think, if we can get a like-minded individual to replace him, we could reorganize our forces to take the fight to the Mandos. It might be too late already, but with a more aggressive strategist at the helm we might just have a chance."_

" _It's not a bad idea, but good luck getting the Committee to agree. Sek-shoral's their man."_

" _We're already in talks with Minister Delko. He's on board." Grethar chuckled at Lesami's expression, seeming inordinately proud with himself for surprising her. "We just have to give him a name. If it's one he likes, he's promised he'll wring arms until the rest of the Committee signs off on it."_

" _Did you have someone in mind?"_

 _Saul didn't say a word, and neither did Grethar. He just stared at her._

 _It only took a few seconds for Lesami to figure out what they were not-saying. She rolled her eyes, and said, her voice thick with a scoff, "Very funny, boys. Be serious, who are you really thinking?"_

" _I think they_ are _being serious, Lesami." For his part, Alek sounded amused, his eyes practically dancing with contained laughter._

" _You're fucking kidding me. It was hard enough just getting a mysterious no-name Jedi a commission, now you want to put me in charge of the whole bloody military? You really think Delko will go for that?"_

 _Saul shrugged. "It might take some convincing. But I don't think you realize how popular Revan is already. That damn mask is everywhere now. They might go for it just for the boost to morale. And politics, heroes are good for elections. Besides," he said, lips tilting into a teasing smirk, "didn't you say you wanted Revan to be as visible as possible, so the Mandos couldn't possibly miss you? What better way than to make you Supreme Commander?"_

 _By the heat of the glare she shot him, Lesami found that argument particularly irritating. He just smiled back at her._

 _Saul'd won and, as annoyed as she might be, Lesami knew it._

* * *

"Admiral? Could I have a moment in private?"

Saul Karath turned from the viewport — the nightside of Taris floating above him, a million twinkling lights winking over his head, like the sky denser and more colorful — to face the officer next to him. A face he recognized above the muted silver and black of an IIS analyst, a face that made him nervous, a nervousness that had nothing to do with the bright red of her eyes, the harshly-angled tattoos darkening her skin, the crown of stubby horns.

No, his anxiety had a very specific cause: he remembered what assignment he'd given this particular analyst. If Kanyr Sheq had come to him it could only be about one thing.

He paused a moment, just for a breath, to force his heart down from where it'd leapt up his throat. "My quarters, Major Sheq. I'll be with you in a moment."

Kanyr nodded, turned smartly on her heel to disappear across the bridge. He didn't move immediately, took another moment to stare up at the stillness of Taris filling the sky, loom over a couple of the bridge officers. Once he felt a respectable amount of time had passed, he nodded to Rahn, stepped off the bridge.

It wouldn't do to appear _too_ concerned with what Kanyr had to tell him, after all.

When he stepped into his office, Kanyr was waiting at his desk, sitting with her legs folded at the knee and hands limply hanging off the end of the armrests. Her expression was empty, anxiety hinted at only in the slightest twitching of her foot. Someone less familiar with her wouldn't notice. Saul didn't waste any time, moving straight for his chair on the opposite side. "I do hope this isn't another false alarm."

Kanyr shot him a glare two shades short of insubordinate. She pulled a datapad out of a pocket on the inside of her jacket, fiddled with it for a moment. Then she set it down, gently, one edge tapping against the metal of his desk before slowly laying it level.

One glance at the screen, and Saul was taken with a full-body twitch, his throat blocked again with a throbbing that had no business being there. He picked it up, twitching eyes skimming over text, jumping up now and again to stare at the face in the image. It only took him a brief moment to get the picture, each second turning his fingers numb, his brain afire with distracting tingles.

He took a long, slow breath, desperately reaching for a calm that evaded him.

"You're certain this time." His voice sounded sort of calm — calmer than he felt, at least — though unsteady enough he was glad they were in private.

"I was certain last time." His chastising glance seemed to have little effect on her. "Yes, I'm certain. False positives from facial recognition _do_ happen — there are simply too many humans and not enough variety in their features to distinguish them reliably. But a false positive on _genetic_ I.D.? What are the chances of that, one in _quadrillions?_ No," she said, head sharply shaking, "there's no mistake.

"Of course, there was no mistake last time either." Her voice had turned a bit reproachful, shooting him a hooded glare. "That _was_ Her Excellency on Coruscant."

"You can't possibly know that."

Kanyr closed her eyes for a moment, taking a slow breath in and out through her nose. She leaned forward, enough to glance over the edge of the pad, with a few swipes of her finger opened another file. "Shan's task force was seen over Coruscant. They travelled up the Namadii Corridor rimward to Dorin, then trailing through Agamar. They were last seen at Garqi. I assume they were headed for one of our assets along the border — I wasn't aware they had intelligence on any of them, but what else could they be doing up there?

"Of course, then they got wind of our little trap here. It's not far, here to Garqi, it fits the timeline. A couple days later, Her Excellency shows up at a bank. I tried to trace her back on the public security cams, but there are too many gaps — I suspect she's holed up in the lower city, their eyes there have been out for centuries.

"But," she said, pointing up with one finger, " _after_ she stopped at the bank, she went to a clinic, a few blocks away, run by a known Republic loyalist by the name of Zelka Forn. Run back the feed a few days, and she's being dragged into that same clinic, in pretty bad shape — dragged in by Carth Onasi, of all people. I followed them back to a ruined escape pod the ground teams have identified as originating from the _Endar Spire_.

"Now, back on Coruscant, there was a last-minute change to the crew manifest. At the request of the Jedi, they took on a civilian, a xenolinguistics professor from the University of Aldera named Cianen Hayal. Someone did a hell of a thorough job on her footprint — official docs, family and economic history, academic work going back about a decade, everything carefully backdated and duplicated in all the proper places." Her lips tilted in a smile, a portion of her uncharacteristic solemnity thawing. "They're good, but I'm better."

He didn't doubt that — the Zabrak tendency toward enthusiastic, single-minded dedication was quite useful when harnessed properly. While she'd been talking, Saul had been paging through the file she'd compiled on this Hayal, annotated with her own comments. A lot of it went over his head — espionage was _not_ his game — but he hadn't needed her to hint at it aloud to get the upshot. "You believe Cianen Hayal is a false identity."

"Yes," she said, her head bobbing in a forceful nod. "Her records were carefully backdated, but whatever program their slicer wrote to diffuse them across the proper servers off Coruscant forgot to account for differences in architecture. On external servers, the time stamps on their edits weren't modified. That, and there are a few discrepancies in her credfol, but that took my crawlers going at it to even notice. Like I said, very thorough, but not good enough.

"What I can't figure is why she was spending so long on Coruscant — and with the _Jedi_ , at that. The cams have her going in and out of the Temple every day for weeks. Doesn't make any sense."

In any other situation, he might have laughed at the frustration on her face. Normally he wouldn't think this of a Zabrak, they were a very intense people, but she was nearly pouting, it was cute. But he knew what had happened, only one thing made sense, the black horror was already seeping through him, choking off the peculiarly affectionate thought before it could even really begin. "The Jedi didn't kill her. They brainwashed her. They wiped her mind completely, and replaced her identity with one that suits their purposes."

For a few seconds Kanyr stared at him, lips parted and eyes wide, the same horror that stole through him plain on her face. "That... They can _do_ that?"

"Small-scale manipulation of memory is child's play for a Jedi. Something like _this_ , however, is purely theoretical. But possible, perhaps." He handed the datapad back to her, a humorless smile twisting his lips. "Unless you have a better explanation."

"No, I..." She shook her head, something halfway between a sigh and dark laughter escaping her. "This is just... Is she really our Lady anymore if she doesn't remember anything?"

Ordinarily, Saul might worry about the same thing. But he wasn't worried. He'd learned quite a lot about how exactly this Force magic worked, both from reading texts Lesami had provided and from observation. Basic memory manipulation _was_ child's play to Jedi, that was true, but it was more complicated than it sounded.

A permanent alteration was, essentially, one of their mind tricks anchored to the target, continually suppressing the memory in question. Eventually, the mind would incorporate the suggestion into itself, from which point it was irreversible, but this took time. Often years. And that period was longer for particularly strong-willed individuals. The suggestion itself was weakened each time the brain attempted to access the repressed memory; the larger the memory, the more skills and knowledge that were locked away, the more often the suggestion was assaulted, the shorter it lasted.

Lesami was an _exceptionally_ strong-willed individual. That was how Force powers worked: the more focused and determined and confident the user, the more they were capable of. Just comparing with his inexpert eye the things Lesami had done with what he'd seen other Jedi could do, he wasn't sure there was anyone out there who could simply overwhelm her, force her mind to yield itself. Temporarily, perhaps, but _permanently?_

The weaknesses in memory alteration were only more critical when it came to an attempt to completely overwrite one's identity. The associations hard-wired into a person's brain were defined by their experiences, and couldn't be changed — unless the replacement identity had led a virtually identical life, which would defeat the whole point, the disharmony between brain and mind would create instabilities in the constructed personality. And if the disguise were less than perfect, even the _slightest_ flaws would eat away at the suggestion.

It would inevitably weaken, bit by bit. This Cianen Hayal would fall apart, slowly at first but ever faster, each hole in the narrative of her life only opening up another to scrutiny. Inevitably, the entire thing would collapse.

"She'll be back, Kanyr." Saul gave her the softest smile he could manage — which, he knew, was only slightly warmer than hard vacuum. "This is Her Excellency we're talking about. No chains can hold her for long.

"I want you to keep an eye on her. Cover your tracks, don't let anyone find out what you're doing, Sith or Republic. Report any developments to me. In person, in private. Understood?"

Kanyr nodded; by the slight quirking of her lips, she was a little offended he'd felt the need to tell her to keep it secret. "And if one of the Jedi pulls it out of my head?"

"I suppose it depends which one it is." The Sith Jedi came in two varieties. Most of them were, well, people — they certainly acted more like a person than normal Jedi did. Some of them though...

Alek wasn't the only one to lose his bloody mind.

"If you think you're outed, don't bother denying it. Just say you're acting under orders from me." That should prevent her from being killed out of hand, hopefully. And no matter how angry the Jedi in question was, Saul was confident he was safe — they needed _someone_ to command their navy. And he was very good at his job. He was certain that was the only reason Alek hadn't had him eliminated, despite his questionable loyalties. "Get back before you're missed, Major.'

Kanyr unconsciously straightened at the formal address. "Yes, sir." With a quick nod, she was on her feet and headed for the door out.

"Be careful."

Her hand on the pad, she glanced over her shoulder, her face pulled into a cocky smirk. "Aren't I always?" And she was gone.

Before the door had even fully hissed shut Saul was already reaching for his console.

* * *

 _Netha cringed, ducking her head and covering her eyes with her arm, gritting her teeth as black dust clawed at her skin. By the time the ship came to a halt only a few steps away, hovering a meter above the craggy, blasted wastes of Sleheyron, she felt scraped and raw, her arms and legs and stomach all too hot, throbbing with every beat of her heart._

 _At least she'd had the foresight to steal a curtain to wrap over her head like a shawl — she didn't want to know what that would feel like on her lekku._

 _A boarding hatch at the side of the ship smoothly descended, Netha framed with harsh, artificial light. And there was the human noblewoman from before, legs splayed against the movement of the little ship, her front foot right on the lip. Smiling at Netha, one hand held out to her. "Come on, then. We're in something of a rush."_

 _Without a second of hesitation, Netha took the woman's hand and allowed herself to be pulled onto the ship._

 _There was a faint beeping noise as the woman brought the inside of her wrist up near her face. Switching to Basic, she said, "She's up. Get us out of here." The ship was moving before she'd even finished the sentence, tilting and banking as it jumped forward, Netha clutched at her rescuer to keep herself from tumbling right back out the hatch. Seemingly unaffected, the woman reached for a nearby control panel, with a push of a button it lifted back shut, the quickly increasing roar of passing wind blotted out as quick as it'd started. "Max the null out, Nisa. I don't think our guest has ever been out of atmo before."_

 _In a blink, the pull of acceleration, down and back, instantly vanished. Netha would have went right back over the other way, but the lady was as solid as steel, she didn't even lean a little bit. Suddenly realizing what she was doing, her hands jumped away from the woman's clothes. "Sorry, my lady," she mumbled, trying to ignore the heat on her face._

 _The lady pouted back at her — which was a bit absurd, she was a grown woman. "I thought I asked you to call me Lesami." Then she smiled, hooking Netha around the elbow. "Come on, I'll show you around."_

 _There wasn't a whole lot of ship to show her. From the outside, it was a sleek, pretty thing, all soft curves and gleaming whites and reds, but while obviously expensive it was a rather small ship. A central room that doubled as den and kitchen, a single shared sleeping area, a cargo hold that sat mostly empty — that was pretty much it. Not that Netha was much complaining, she couldn't remember the last time she'd actually had a bed to herself._

 _Babbling off about something to do with whoever they'd borrowed the ship from — which Netha was a little surprised by, she'd been under the impression Lesami was independently wealthy — Lesami led her into the middle room, Netha quickly distracted by the man sprawled out across a sofa. His features were human enough she would have assumed he were one, if she hadn't learned by now that few species had as much variation in skin coloring as her people did. The deep red skin and glittering blue-black hair, this was a Zeltron._

 _Netha tried not to look any more uncomfortable than she already was. She had...mixed experiences with Zeltrons._

 _The man pushed himself up to sitting, his drab, heavy robe shifting about him. "This the girl, then?" He had a very obvious core accent, though with more of a lazy drawl than was entirely proper._

 _Petering to a halt in the middle of the room, Lesami planted her hands on her hips, shooting the Zeltron an exasperated look. "Yes, this is_ the girl _. Don't stare at her like that, Sesai. It's rude."_

 _And he had been staring at her, narrowed eyes unnaturally still, head cocked slightly to the side, his gaze intense enough Netha felt her skin crawl, but at the admonishment he twitched, shot Lesami a sheepish glance. "Sorry. Just, you're right, she is powerful."_

" _Am I ever wrong?"_

" _Not about that kind of thing, no."_

 _Over the next couple hours, her three rescuers — Nisotsa eventually emerged from the cockpit, a human woman with light hair and a round face, eyes a peculiar green — talked among themselves, about admirals and Jedi Masters and Sith Lords and planets and sectors and treaties and alliances, all of it far over Netha's head. She just sat there, hugging her reconstituted stew to herself, later a sweet heated drink of a kind she didn't recognize, she hardly said a word, just stared at a single point in head of her, trying not to remember._

 _Eventually, she didn't know how much later, Lesami suggested she might want to catch some sleep which, honestly, wasn't a terrible idea. Netha hadn't slept since...well, for a while. She hadn't been able to the night she'd met Lesami, she'd been too tense, too afraid, too, too..._ excited _, she hadn't been able to get the idea out of her head, she could do it, she_ could _, she'd be_ free...

 _And after she'd sneaked and murdered her way through Omeesh's palace, of course, there'd simply been no time to sleep. How many days ago had that been? One? Two? She wasn't sure, the hours had started blurring together..._

 _She remembered, the knife glowing red with the heat of her fury, burrowing into the sick slimy fuck's head, moving on its own, burning its way further, further, he tried to get away but he couldn't, she wouldn't let her, instead he could only scream, tail pounding against the floor, Netha's head had hurt, she'd felt too full, too_ hot _, but at once she'd felt_ wonderful _, she'd been_ laughing—

 _She shivered, arms coming up to hug herself. Yes, she could use some sleep right about now._

 _In the little shared sleeping area, pulling from the closets fresh linens for the bed and clothes for Netha to change into, Lesami froze in mid sentence. "Oh, I'm... This is going to sound stupid, but, I never actually did get your name."_

 _It was sort of funny, that it'd taken this long to even ask. Netha had the feeling this Lesami was more a woman of action than of leisure — why talk when she could do? Though, the only 'name' she had to offer cut out any humor she might have found otherwise. "They call me Netha."_

 _A blank, terrifyingly cold look stole over Lesami's face. (Did she speak Ryl? Netha had never met a human who could before.) "I see." For a moment she stared — not at Netha, more some point behind her shoulder — her eyes black and still and merciless. And then she was back, her face softening, taken with a wry sort of smile. "You might consider picking a new one."_

 _Netha shrugged. She would have no idea what to choose. But she shrugged the uncomfortable thought off, latched onto another. "You don't like the Hutts."_

 _Giving her an odd sort of look, Lesami said, "Should I?" Then she twitched, glancing away a little, as Netha shrugged off the tattered remains of her dress. (Which was strange, but okay.) "I have no issue with the race in general, of course, but the kajidics as a whole are despicable."_

 _Cinching the pants closed took a little bit of figuring — she'd never worn anything of the like before, the fabric was very strange — but she got it after a few seconds. "Then why did you come here? I thought you were making a business deal or something with them, but..."_

 _Lesami smirked. "Sometimes, you have to tolerate a few kreks at your feet until after you've dealt with the lylek in front of you."_

 _She paused for a second, blinking at the human woman. That had been Ryl, smooth and easy, as natural as a native speaker. "Who's the lylek?" Personally, Netha couldn't imagine there were many people in the galaxy worse than the Hutts. More dangerous, perhaps — though the Hutts had been around a_ long _time, and did have a history of slaughtering entire planets that annoyed them..._

" _That's not important right now. You've had a long couple days. We'll be out there if you need anything."_

 _Netha glanced at the other empty beds in the room. "Aren't you all going to be sleeping in here too?"_

" _Oh, no," Lesami said, brushing it off. "We'll just meditate for a couple hours when we need to. By now we've all learned to avoid sleep when travelling alone. Habits of war, and all that. Don't worry about us, we'll be fine."_

" _...Okay." Netha was pretty sure normal people couldn't just meditate to forgo sleep entirely. That wasn't how anything worked. But then, she was also pretty sure Lesami, Nisotsa, and Sesai were anything but normal._

" _Sleep well, Freewoman." With a last smile, Lesami turned on her heel and left._

 _For long seconds, Netha could only sit there on the bed, staring at the closed door, blinking to herself. That had been in Ryl again, and she'd put a peculiar emphasis on "Freewoman"...but it hadn't been the normal word, either. Normally, it was said passive like, a person who has_ been freed _by someone else. But Lesami had said it, like, a person who_ has freed _herself. Similar meaning, but not quite the same thing._

 _That odd emphasis, that warmth in her eyes..._

Yuthu-ra ba'n.

 _Weakly at first, her lips twitching before settling into it, she smiled._

* * *

Yuthura typed in the familiar commands, clearing out net records and keystrokes over the last minutes, a few more to similarly scrub the Academy server, the relay over Korriban.

And she sat in front of her terminal, for long moments, staring into nothing.

 _She's alive_.

That's what the notice had said, the gist of it. Posted onto an anonymous message board, hidden deep within the Sith military network. It wasn't indexed, only the people who knew the exact address could access it, only those trusted few who'd been told about it. Those who were still loyal.

She was alive. There were many who'd _believed_ she'd survived, yes, just on blind faith, but there'd been no _evidence_ , no reason to...

Lesami was _alive_.

Yuthura leaned her elbows against her desk, her hands covering her face, forced out a long, shaky sigh. It was overwhelming, heavy relief and vicious joy hot and thick filling her chest to bursting, but she couldn't let it out. Others would feel it, they'd be suspicious. So she held herself apart, pulled her feeling from self, where it couldn't expand through her out into the world. Without anything to feed on it quickly guttered out, and she was still and empty again.

But she smiled even so.

Once her mind was safely placid, Yuthura typed out a single, brief message. Then she closed out her terminal, and left her rooms behind her.

The Academy on Korriban had always struck her as an exercise in empty pride. More than anything, the continued existence of the institution was an overt attempt to embrace the legend, the history of the early Sith. The obvious falsehoods built into the Academy's narrative of its own history were quite glaring, once one knew enough.

The Academy was not nearly so old as it claimed to be. It was said there had been an institution of learning on this spot for going on ten thousand years, that it had been in continuous operation for most of the history of the old empire. But that was nonsense — the old Sith had mostly abandoned Korriban when the environment, strained by generations of industrial exploitation, had finally collapsed some five thousand years ago. A small population of cultists had remained behind, adherents of their old ancestor-worshipping religion enduring the harsh wasteland to maintain the temples dedicated to leaders millennia dead. The structure of the Academy had most likely been a temple itself, where pilgrims purified themselves before entering the Valley.

Honestly, Sith Academies hadn't even _existed_ before the Great Migration a thousand years ago. Public institutions dedicated to collective study of the Force were a foreign concept to them.

Many she'd spoken to claimed the Academy on Korriban was the most prestigious of all such institutions in the Empire, but that was equally far from the truth. As far as the wider Empire was concerned, modern Korriban was a backwater, of interest only to archaeologists, zealots, and foreigners. Most former Jedi these days did study at Korriban, yes, but they didn't know anything about the bulk of the Empire outside of Republic-explored space — they often had no idea there were other options, had no idea where to look for them. Few had even heard rumors about the Sith holdings throughout the galactic west until after joining.

The point was, the Academy on Dromund Kaas was generally considered far superior. Only Korriban alumni held such a high opinion of the one here.

Even the appearance of the Academy hinted at its minor importance. The hall she walked down now was ancient, yes, grainy red stone carved who knew how many millennia ago, but it did look just that: _old_. The walls and floors were half-eroded in places, fine dust collecting here and there, every glimpse of advanced technology — computers, the long strips of lighting folded into the upper corners, even the _doors_ — had been added later, modernity fitted into the ancient stone with all the subtlety of a plasma grenade to the face. It grated on her a little, how obviously it all clashed.

Though it was far from the only thing here at the Academy she found irritating.

A quick glance at her chrono confirmed she had about a half hour before the afternoon assembly. Wandering through the maze of dilapidated corridors shortly brought her to the student dorms, a swipe of her chit over the lock and the door swished open. The students' rooms were ascetic little things, little more than dark stone and a simple bed and desk, monochromatic and grim. Uthar and her own apartments were lavish by comparison. Not surprising, given that the Korriban Academy had a habit of attracting the less pleasant sort of Sith for its instructors.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed was a dark-skinned human woman, shortly out of adolescence but her face lined with exhaustion. Her eyes, dark and bloodshot, were narrowed with concentration, an open hand hovering over a sorcery focusing crystal, blue-purple facets formed into a rough pyramid lined with silver. As Yuthura watched, sparks crackled between her fingers, electricity playing over the crystal, and the woman jumped, wincing with pain and shaking out her hand.

"You're still thinking, Thalia."

Thalia jumped again, eyes wildly flicking up to find Yuthura at the door. Starting to scramble to her feet, she gasped, "Master, I'm sorry, I didn't—"

Part of Yuthura still squirmed whenever anyone called her that. "Don't get up. You're still working on conjuring lightning, I see."

Grimacing, she nodded. "I don't know what's wrong. I just can't get it."

"You're thinking too much." At Thalia's baffled, doubtful look Yuthura couldn't help a slight smile. "From what I can tell from the glimpse I got, you are accomplishing exactly what you are attempting to accomplish. The issue is that you're attempting the wrong thing. That was electricity you cast, normal electricity pulled from the environment. Which is itself an accomplishment, few ever develop significant talent manipulating energy directly like that." She nearly mentioned Revan's particular talent with tutaminis, but caught herself at the last instant — speaking positively of Lesami where one could be overheard was a little risky these days. "Power is not your problem. _Intent_ is your problem.

"Proper Sith lightning is not true electricity, Thalia. It is the will to cause suffering made manifest. It is not something you think about. It is something you _feel_."

Thalia met her eyes with a mulish sort of glare for a couple seconds, the air around her simmering with her discontent. Then, catching herself, her face smoothed over, any hint of her feelings disappearing from the Force. Thalia might be having some trouble with even the most basic of sorcery, but at least she had decent control over herself.

There were two kinds of Sith. Yuthura would rather see the Empire filled with mediocre Sith than the wrong kind.

"I mean no offense, but, how am I supposed to _do_ that?"

Yuthura smiled. "Are you telling me you have never hated anyone? That there is no one in all the galaxy you would enjoy to see suffer?"

Shifting a bit on her bed, Thalia shrugged. "I was under the impression nurturing that sort of hatred ultimately led to madness."

It took some effort to keep the victorious grin off her face. Apparently, slipping Revan's writings into the required reading list — carefully paraphrased, and attributed to other, innocuous figures — was already paying off.

There were two kinds of Sith. One was what, she'd learned, the Jedi thought of when they pictured users of the Dark Side, what they thought all Sith were like. As Lesami put it, these were Sith whose passion was focused within. On their own pride, their own desires. The problem with this was, well, the Jedi weren't entirely wrong about channelling the Dark Side. As the saying goes, power corrupts — focusing that kind of power through petty emotions to selfish ends, bit by bit each time, gradually turns a person's mind toward pettiness and selfishness. Do it too much, and a Sith can become so thoroughly corrupted that they see nothing beyond themselves, their own aggrandizement and their own pleasures, a self-sustaining cycle that only drives the user further and further into unrecoverable, self-destructive madness.

But that wasn't what most Sith were actually like — that particular brand of Force-user had always been a minority in the old Empire, limited to a particular segment of the aristocracy. If _all_ Dark Side users were like that, the Sith wouldn't have lasted very long as a civilization. It just doesn't work on a large scale.

It _was_ possible to use personal anger and hatred to channel the Dark Side without feeding into the cycle, to release the feeling in the process instead of branding it into one's soul, but it could become a trap, one that former Jedi often fell into. Jedi were taught from a very early age to release their more burdensome feelings into the Force, to let them dissipate into depersonalizing everything. But sometimes, in the moment, they would be too overwhelmed with frustration, hatred righteous or otherwise, and without thinking they would use the power their passion gave them, driving themselves deeper into the Force even as they let it sweep the emotion that had gotten them there away.

But then they remembered that power it'd given them, and took from it exactly the wrong lesson. It was the _Force_ that had given them that power, not their passion — their passion had given them the will to reach further than they usually could, but the power still wasn't truly theirs. But they'd learned the wrong lesson, they nurtured their fury and their hate, carrying it with them always, a constant source of passion they could exploit whenever necessary. One that drove them, inevitably, into madness.

It wasn't _using_ negative emotions that was the problem — _holding onto them_ was what led to corruption. Letting oneself be consumed by their own darkness, bit by bit, until nothing else was left. It was _possible_ to use private passion to drive oneself into the Dark Side but then let the storm wash it away, leaving oneself clean. But this was playing with fire. Lesami had explicitly recommended against it, said it took superior discipline and self-control to not get carried away, more than most people were capable of.

Instead, she'd recommended an old Sith way of thinking, the method that was taught primarily to their soldiers, their priests, much of the less important noble families. The people who society overall could not afford to have going mad with poisonous self-interest. A person's passion should not be _internal_ , but _external_. Not sourced from and directed toward their internal experience, their position in life, but the reality of the world around them, its structure and its functioning.

True enlightenment, she'd written, true power, came not from understanding and uplifting oneself. For the individual, no matter how powerful they might be, was but one among thousands of trillions, alive for the briefest of moments. On a galactic scale, what might seem important to the individual became insignificant, or vice versa.

What it came down to was that Thalia was thinking about the wrong kind of hatred. "I understand you were once part of the AgriCorp, back in the Republic." Though why the hell the Order had passed up on making Thalia a proper Jedi Yuthura couldn't possibly imagine — she _was_ powerful, just standing within a few feet of her that was undeniable. "Why did you leave?"

Thalia looked less than comfortable with the question, turning away to moodily glare at the wall. But, after a few seconds of thick silence, she answered. "I was with a team on Anobis, an agriworld near Ord Mantell."

Yuthura nodded. She wasn't familiar with the planet — there were far too many in the galaxy to know them all — but just to prompt Thalia on.

"A couple centuries ago, Seni got a huge contract, they manage half the agriculture on the planet for the Republic. Oh, Seni is a corporate conglomerate owned by a few Tionese families, by the way, not important. Anyway, they..." Thalia trailed off, stared at the wall for another second. Her eyes had gone darker, deeper, subtle horror pulling at her face. "Most large-scale agriculture is done mechanically, of course, but some things are too sensitive, they have to be done by hand. There's this fruit they grow on Anobis it— Never mind, the details aren't...

"There's this native species, not recognized sentients. Shasha, they're called. There were some millions of them already there when the planet was discovered. They're, about, waist-high," Thalia said, holding a hand over the floor as though measuring, "maybe a little taller. They're...well, definitely mammals, but I wouldn't describe them as any particular archetype. Um, long and thin, big fluffy ears, clawed hands, but still very dextrous.

"Seni, they... They keep them. By the hundreds of thousands, millions. They pick the fruit, clean it, package it. When they're not working, they're kept in these big compounds, packed in there, hardly given enough to survive. And Seni, they, they breed them, they drug them. They kill the ones that are too old or sick or...uncooperative.

"At first I found the whole thing, just, unsettling, but then..." Thalia's face twisted, a grimace of long-simmering rage boiling to the surface. "They're _sentient_. Seni insists they aren't, the official Republic position agrees. But they _are_. I wasn't so good with the mind stuff back then, but, they have language, they have personalities. The ones outside of the compounds, living off in the wilds, they have villages, they have _culture_. And Seni keeps them as slaves, _millions_ of them, in conditions no better than if they were animals. They claim they _are_ animals!

"And I tried to—" Her voice cutting off so hard her throat clicked, Thalia leaned forward a bit, holding her face in her hands. Fury and hatred and despair pulsed against Yuthura, the intensity of it all coming as a bit of a surprise — Yuthura had had absolutely no idea Thalia had been carrying something like this. (Though not unusual, most former Jedi among the Sith had been similarly disillusioned.) "The Master with us that year, I tried to get him to... He said it wasn't our place, that we didn't have the authority to do anything about it. It was outside of our mandate. Seni had the planetary government behind them, the sector government, all the way up to the fucking Senate. I..."

"It sickened you." Thalia's hands dropped, slowly, and she stared up at Yuthura, flushed and tense, the air in the little room filled, electric, _powerful_. "You felt so helpless, so hopeless, so full of rage you couldn't hold it all. It made you sick."

"Yes," she said, nodding. "I was sick, a few times. I mean, literally."

Her voice falling into a low, forceful whisper, Yuthura hissed, " _There_ is your answer, Thalia. Remember what is done to the Shasha, _that_ is your passion. Let it flow into the Force, let _it_ carry _you_ for once. Push your rage outward, and make all those responsible _hurt_ for what they've done."

This time, when the focusing crystal was wreathed with crackling energy, it glowed a bloody red, and Thalia's hand came away unscathed.

And Yuthura smiled. Looked like they would soon have another of the proper kind of Sith.

In the end, Yuthura managed to get Thalia to assembly in time — she had a habit of getting absorbed in her studies and showing up late, or just missing the meeting entirely, which was not good for her future health. Uthar was his usual melodramatic, sadistic self. The whole assembly, Uthar smugly lecturing at and occasionally torturing their students, Yuthura just stood behind his shoulder, tried to keep her disgust off her face.

The Academy on Korriban had always been...questionable, had a tendency to attract the wrong kind of Sith. Something about the air here, she thought, the poison and death of millennia past seeping into the soul. It was why Yuthura had come here in the first place, in fact, to do her best to nurture the proper kind of Sith, shield them from the excesses of people like Uthar.

She'd had some success before, but things had become more difficult since Malak had taken over. Malak was the wrong kind of Sith, and he surrounded himself with more of the same. Having one of their own at the top had emboldened his ilk across the Empire, the proper kind of Sith slowly shuffled into the background, one by one. (Or simply outright murdered.) In the most visible example, last month Nisotsa had been ousted from her position as Minister of State, which had been hers since the Empire's inception. Malak hadn't even given a reason for dismissing her, which had sparked political unrest on a handful of Imperial worlds that only got worse as it went on — Lady Thul, as she was usually called, had managed to make herself _very_ popular over the years, enough there were even whisperings of a movement to remove Malak and put her at the top.

The wrong kind of Sith did seem to overlook the common people entirely. That was a fatal mistake. There might be thousands of Force-trained Sith, but the Empire was made up of _trillions_ of beings. Big guns and fancy magic tricks only kept them in line for so long.

The proper kind of Sith weren't taking all of this lying down, of course, but they had to be careful. They were the majority, but they didn't currently hold any significant positions in leadership, and despite the problems of recent years Malak still commanded too much loyalty won by his previous accomplishments. It didn't help that far too many of the wrong kind of Sith happened to be the more powerful ones. They would win eventually, but they had to organize, they had to plan, it would take time.

Unless Revan showed up and sparked a sudden, explosive civil war. Which, unless something unforeseen intervened, was exactly what was going to happen.

Eventually, the assembly came to an end — and without anyone dying this time, look at that. Yuthura went about the rest of her evening routine. Slipping subversive advice to the more promising students, further ingratiating herself with the soldiers and administrative staff, the usual. But she was cut short when the com at her waist pinged. She had a call waiting for her back in her rooms.

The location and identity of her caller was blocked but, when she took the call at her desk, she wasn't at all surprised to see the face of Sesai Rhysa snap into existence before her. "Why if it isn't little Yuthura!" he said with a grin, the washed-out colors of the hologram failing to communicate the twinkle in his eyes she knew would be there. "I haven't heard from you in _ages_. And I thought we were friends, I'm hurt."

Yuthura shot him a half-hearted glare. "I know what you consider 'friendship', and I'm not interested."

He sucked in a harsh gasp, face twisting with false agony. "Ooh, ouch, Yuthura, _ouch_. That _hurts_ , right here. You can't see it, but my hand is over my heart right now."

"Could you cut the dramatics for five seconds, Sesai? I did call you for a reason."

"Right, of course." The despair vanished, but that didn't mean he was taking it seriously yet — Yuthura knew that crooked smile, it was far too familiar by this point. "Okay, what is a big-shot Academy instructor doing calling little ole me, then?"

Yuthura's eyes rolled before she could stop them. Sesai was one of the Empire's best counter-intelligence agents, he was much more of a "big-shot" than she was. "Lesami's alive."

Finally all traces of humor vanished, leaving Sesai's face uncharacteristically solemn. "You're certain. How do you know?"

"I got it from Admiral Karath. I haven't seen his intelligence, but I'm sure it's good." The post she'd seen had been anonymous, of course, but Yuthura had already known he was looking for her. And his style _was_ rather distinctive.

"Saul isn't one to jump at shadows, that's true." He paused for a moment, eyes drifted to the side of the holocam, tongue working silently at his teeth. After a few seconds of thought, they snapped back. Lips tilting in a faint smile, he said, "I suppose you called to suggest I go track her down."

"She's been out of touch for some time. We don't know what she knows. We have to open a line of communication, tell her we weren't, we weren't involved, that we'll be behind her when she comes back."

Sesai shook his head. "She doesn't blame us. She'd been concerned about the turn Alek had taken for a while at that point. She actually told me, a couple weeks beforehand, that she suspected he might turn on her soon. Alek simply took an opportunity before she could move to neutralise him."

She blinked. "Oh." Yuthura had had no idea. But then, she wasn't important enough to be in frequent contact with leadership — Lesami had dropped by the Academy every once in a while, but Yuthura certainly hadn't been in the loop. "Well, to start planning at least."

"What makes you so sure she'll want to take the throne again?"

"I'm not." Personally, she wasn't convinced Lesami had truly wanted it in the first place. "But I _am_ sure she won't want Malak on it."

Sesai nodded. "True. Okay, I'll get on it. I have some leave saved up, I should be able to disappear for weeks before anyone notices I'm not where I said I'd be. Maybe I'll even get there quick enough to help her with the assassins. Alek is on Saul's ship, you know, he'll find out eventually."

"I know." Karath had been taught to protect his mind from intrusion, but the techniques available to the Force-blind were imperfect. Malak would pick up on it before too long. "It's not the end of the world if you don't, I'm sure she could fight off anyone he would send."

"Oh, well, yeah. I just _want_ to be there for the assassins." Sesai's soft smile spread into a grin, toothy and eager. "I know you've never actually fought with her before, so you wouldn't know. But she's a thing of beauty when she gets into it. I do miss her."

Sesai was being less than subtle with the nostalgic lust on his voice — but then, he _was_ a Zeltron, that wasn't exactly a surprise. "Do try to contain yourself. She doesn't have a lot of patience for idiocy, and we kind of need you to not get yourself thrown through a bulkhead until after you've opened a channel."

"I think I'm offended again. I've known Lesami a lot longer than you, Yuthura, since we were good little Jedi younglings together."

She tried not to laugh at the thought of Lesami and Sesai ever having been _good little Jedi younglings_.

"I know, I know. Point is, I learned how to not get burned a _long_ time ago." Sesai glanced at something off to the left. "Unless you had anything else, I should start getting things rolling."

"All right. Be careful out there, Sesai."

He smiled, bright and warm. "Honestly, who do you think you're talking to?" The call cut off, the holo blinking out of existence.

Yuthura leaned back in her chair with a huff. Yeah, she knew _exactly_ who she'd been talking to. Sesai could be subtle when he really needed to be — he wouldn't be nearly so capable an operative if he couldn't — but when he _didn't_ try to put a lid on his...eccentricities... Things did have a tendency to quickly go completely insane whenever he was around. Like most of the original Revanchists, really.

They took after their leader like that, she thought, smirking to herself.

* * *

Sith Jedi — _Excluding a few eccentrics who read up about this stuff, the average person doesn't really get this Light/Dark Jedi/Sith stuff. To them, the Republic and the Empire are simply competing states, each of which have their own Jedi. Calling someone "Sith" just means they're from/with the Empire; calling someone a "Jedi" just means they have superpowers. And yes, the Order gets very annoyed whenever someone calls the Sith "Jedi"._

[krek...lylek] — _Creatures native to Ryloth, the Twi'lek homeworld. A krek is a sort of beetle-like thing, while a lylek is a large, deadly predator._

[galactic west] — _In-universe language sometimes uses the anachronism of planetary maps to refer to orientation in the galaxy, just as a casual convention. The "galactic west" Yuthura refers to corresponds mostly to the large swath of unexplored space on the opposite side of the core. There are advanced cultures here, in extensive trade with each other but not unified into a single state. They're not primitive, they just don't recognize Coruscant as the center of civilization, and have only minimal contact with the east._

 _I put Dromund Kaas in this region (a little north of the Chiss Ascendency), while in canon it's located in traditional Sith space in the outer rim, halfway between the Hydian and Perlemian. This is, honestly, ludicrous. The entire area has been charted (if not quite thoroughly) by the Republic for centuries, and sits near some important centers of galactic commerce. We're supposed to believe the Sith Empire managed to, just, hide there, slowly building up the forces necessary to fight the Republic to a stalemate over the course of one and a half thousand years, and_ _ **nobody ever noticed**_ _? Do you have any idea the kind of resources necessary to support militaries on this kind of scale? Pull the other one, Bioware._

 _Instead, I moved the Kaasite Sith out to the northern Unknown Regions, where they've been gradually building up an empire for a thousand years at this point. Makes their invasion of the Republic in SWTOR a few hundred years down the line far more believable._

Anobis — _Canonically, Anobis wouldn't actually be settled for roughly another thousand years. However, I'm not sure that's practical. It's just off a significant trade route, and should be within a couple hops of Ord Mantell. All the "Ord" worlds were colonised as military outposts during the Pius Dea Republic (ORD = Ordinance/Regional Depo). By the time of KotOR, Ord Mantell would have been settled for roughly nine thousand years. The suggestion that the immediate area wouldn't have been charted after all that time is a bit ridiculous. Especially since the whole point of ORD worlds was to protect human colonies in the area._

 _Besides, I needed an agriworld with a convenient location, and Anobis was the first one I found._

* * *

 _I had hoped to have this chapter out earlier. I'd also thought it would be much shorter, but then my brain decided those flashback scenes were necessary, and Yuthura's introspection went overboard. Whoops._

 _This has been mentioned before, but just in case anyone was wondering: the Dark Side works different than in canon. Largely because the canon stuff makes the Sith far too boring._

 _Right, two more Taris chapters after this, and we'll be moving on to Dantooine. Finally._

 _Until next time,  
~Wings_


	9. Taris — IV

Kandosa had been waiting for less than five minutes when his contact appeared. He hadn't seen her at first, small enough she'd nearly been hidden in the shadow of a passing Jilruan.

He might have nearly missed her, but she wouldn't have gone unnoticed for very long. Kandosa had learned a long time ago how much could be read out of how a person walked, how they held themselves. He'd gotten into the habit of observing people, he'd long since started doing it automatically. This human woman — had to be his contact, her face fit the holo he'd been sent perfectly — her walk didn't match the rest of her.

He meant, she looked perfectly normal. Scuffed boots, simple, cheap synthetic clothing, a blaster at her hip accompanied with far more power cells than most would think reasonable just for a walk down the concourse. Perhaps a bit cleaner than one would expect, but everyone had their quirks. She looked ordinary, but she walked like someone important. The unconscious grace of those born into wealth or power, but the sharp confidence of a warrior. Put the two together and he would say, no matter that she looked like nothing but a spacer down on her luck, she moved like a general.

Well. Perhaps this _was_ going to be interesting.

It took but a second for the woman to spot him. She sauntered through the cantina over to his table, carving through the shifting crowd with casual ease, stood across from him. "Kandosa of Ordo, so you're alive."

Kandosa blinked at the fluent Mandoa, only mildly surprised. First contact had been in Mandoa, of course, but it'd been written — there were translators on the net that could handle that with little issue. Perhaps she'd picked it up somewhere, his people were scattered all over the galaxy these days. "Was there a clan name with that, Cina?"

If Cina was surprised by his guess that she was the one making an offer, and not an employee of the same, she didn't react. "No, I haven't the honor, I'm afraid."

"Well, sit down, then," he said, pointing with his chin. She did, smooth and easy, not breaking eye contact on the way down. "So, you have a job for me. What's the target?"

"It's not that kind of job. I don't think it particularly likely, but it's possible there won't be any fighting at all."

That... No, she hadn't just learned Mandoa recently — that was fluent, _native_ speech. Her accent was slightly off, Vorpayya, unless he was mistaken. If she was from Vorpaya, but wasn't a child of a proper clan, she had probably been angling for an adoption before everything had gone to shit. The child of immigrants or exiles, something like that. Though, if she _hadn't_ been raised in a proper clan, and on a largely agricultural planet of all places, she likely wouldn't have been raised Mandoade from childhood, which just made the way she held herself even more strange. He hid his suspicion with a smile — it would be rather rude to draw attention to her circumstances, after all. "But you don't think that likely, so you want backup."

With a wry little smile, the little woman shrugged. "I have a few comrades, and we _will_ be in the fight, but there aren't enough of us. I was hoping we could pick up some extra firep—" Cina cut off, glancing up as the server approached their table. The Rodian woman dropped the platter of fried genishak onto the middle of the table, quickly followed by a couple tall glasses of ale. Once she was gone, Cina turned back to Kandosa, one questioning eyebrow raised.

He nodded. "Fill your boots." Going to such lengths to be hospitable wasn't something he would normally do for a prospective client, but he'd admit the initial message had intrigued him. Everybody knew he was Mandoade, of course, but _nobody_ attempted to treat with him in his own tongue, and certainly didn't think to observe the proper niceties.

It did make rather more sense now, with this Cina being some kind of Mandoade refugee, but that didn't make him any less curious.

With the appropriate half-hearted grunt of thanks, Cina took a strip of the genishak and a sizeable gulp of ale. He waited until the glass came thudding back to the table before speaking. "All right. You just need a little extra firepower. A handful of my boys and myself might be willing to provide that. What is it you have going down, exactly?"

Cina shook her head. "You might not like it."

"Oh, we'll just have to see, won't we?"

She glanced around the room for a second — had to be reflex, nobody on Taris spoke Mandoa — then leaned forward a little over the table. "I'm sure you know of the swoop race coming up."

Shrugging to himself, he said, "I might have heard of it. Another pissing contest between the local trash. They're always scrabbling over which should get to be on top of the heap, I don't always pay attention."

A smirk pulled at her lips, teeth glinting in the colorful light of the cantina. "Something like that, yes. You might have heard the prize offered by the Vulkars is a person, a human woman. I've been contracted by a third party to rescue her. We decided our best shot at a successful extraction is at the race, when she's out in the open. Now, I will have my pilot in the race, and she's good, so she should do well. She will place high, but I'm not sure if she'll win. If she doesn't, we'll have to take her by force."

Kandosa nodded, slowly, something half-remembered niggling at the back of his head. "I see why you want backup — that could get real ugly real fast. What's your team look like?"

"There's me, of course. My second, who's more than decent with a blaster. My best fighter is a Wookiee — I don't know if you're familiar with the species, they're very big and very tough. Not a bad head on that one either, though he can get a little carried away."

He felt his lips twitch. "I know the type."

Returning his smile, amusement in her eyes, Cina shrugged. "The pilot can also fight; she's not quite as good a shot as the rest of us but she's clever as hell, very good in a pinch. My slicer will be hidden up a few levels, she'll be our eyes. I have her practicing with a sniper rifle at the moment, but I wouldn't depend on that, violence isn't her style. That's all of us. When we move to secure the target, the Vulkars and the others will attack, and the Beks are certain to retaliate. But we can't count on that — they'll be hitting the Vulkars, not covering us."

That almost had him grinning — this tiny little thing was casually talking about sparking off a gang war that could easily drag on for months or even years just so she could get at her mark. It was sort of adorable, honestly. "You said you were hired by a third party. If I do agree to help you out, I'll be wanting a cut. Say, thirty-five."

Cina frowned at him for a moment. Then she leaned a little further forward, her voice actually dropping to a mutter this time, barely audible over the music filling the cantina. "There's a reason I came to you, Kandosa of Ordo. You kill for Davik, yes, and most everyone I talked to is right terrified of you. But you have another reputation. People say you're honorable, fair, and reasonable. I could have found some _mir'osiksii_ mercs, they might get the job done, but I'd rather fight with someone I can depend on to have their head straight.

"My point is, Kandosa, I want you to name your price. I'll pay you in Republic credits, whatever you feel is fair. I don't want to swindle you, and I trust you not to swindle me."

It took a short moment, staring flatly back into Cina's eyes, for it to sink in that she was being completely serious.

Somehow, Kandosa managed to hold in his shocked, delighted laughter.

* * *

Mission had never felt so completely awesome in her entire life.

The lower city gangs threw a big swoop race every year or so, though no two were on exactly the same course. Go deep enough under the surface and everything was pretty much abandoned, a forest of monolithic towers and dilapidated concourses and rusting walkbridges and debris. In the weeks before every race, a neutral team would go down to scout out a new course, zigzagging between the obstacles, up and down levels, sometimes even carving tunnels through towers. Cameras were set up here and there throughout the course, giving the spectators and gamblers something to watch — only a very small bit of the course could be seen from the finish line, after all.

It had taken Mission less than half an hour to slice into the system. The day before the race, Zee and Cina had tracked down a spot in an abandoned tower overlooking the staging area, where she was set up now. An array of displays were hooked up to a terminal she'd cannibalized from one of their nests — most waited idle for the race to start, one showed the gathering crowd below her from two angles, the last a few columns of scanning code and one waiting command line.

A constant hissing and chattering in one ear was her line into planetary dispatch, which had been much harder to slice into, though it had actually taken far less time to set it up for today. (She'd cracked the official com channels ages ago, after all.) Her other ear was linked to everyone else's coms, on a channel with a mutating encryption she was actually rather proud of. Not that anyone else on the team was really good enough with cryptography to appreciate it — Zee was ace with hardware, but he didn't have the head for software.

It was just...so...damn... _cool_. She felt like a spy or something in some terribly cheesy holodrama, it was great. Especially when she got to say things like, "Skies still clear, Red. Swarm looks clean." It didn't _look_ like anyone was trying to sabotage the other racers, anyway. The cameras also scanned for disruptive signals, but she didn't see anything.

A gruff voice responded with, "Copy, Scope. Note any changes."

Mission winced, glanced to her left. One of the window panels had been carefully removed, a long, nasty-looking sniper rifle propped against the frame and waiting. The code names had been her idea — she didn't think it was likely anyone would crack her encryption, it just sounded fun — so of course they had to go pick one for her she kind of hated. It turned out she was a far better shot with that thing than a normal blaster, but she still wasn't comfortable with the idea.

Though, she wasn't entirely sure why Asyr was called Red — it wasn't like her fur was red or anything...

"Scope, Twin. Is Heavy in position?"

Before Mission could even glance at her screens to confirm quick, Canderous was answering Carth already. "This isn't my first op, _Chakaar_. Just try not to hit me when it lights up."

Of course, to make things even _more_ awesome, they were working with a legit Mandalorian mercenary. Mandalorians were scary, she wouldn't deny that — she couldn't remember the invasion very well, it'd been too long ago, but the people who did remember didn't have nice things to say. And, well, they were a bit big and hard and intimidating. (At least Canderous was, anyway.) But they were just so... _badass_ , yeah? As though this didn't feel enough like some ridiculous holodrama already, they just had to pick up a grizzled jaded soldier type. Just kept getting better and better.

" _Kandosa, ken copaani sa-talganr. Ache naar ven parji, juan ni sa tagar lise aat-kiramur. Jat?"_ That was completely meaningless to Mission, but she recognized the voice easily enough, even with how her encryption distorted the sound a little. Apparently, Cina spoke Mandalorian. Which wasn't as much of a surprise as it should have been, Mission wasn't convinced there were languages Cina didn't speak.

" _Orijate, ni burcha. Ven pakodshia sa ham'halai._ "

" _Jehaachii._ "

" _Gar jorhai sa ni jehaatii?_ "

" _Iji anaat ru. Chon gar buche—_ "

His exasperation clear even over the com, Carth said, "Would you two stop that? Seriously, listening to Pads and Red go on in Bothan was bad enough, I don't need Mando gibberish too."

"Very subtle, _aruetii_. I'm sure nobody listening in will find a Bothan on Taris at all suspicious."

Mission couldn't resist. "Nobody's listening in, Heavy. It'd take days to slice this channel, we won't be using it that long."

"I don't doubt it, _ad'ika_. That doesn't mean Twin isn't an idiot."

She shrugged — she wasn't about to disagree there. It'd been a week now, and Carth still hadn't done or said anything to change her immediate first impression of him. She really did hate it when people she was _way_ smarter than treated her like a helpless little kid who needed to be hidden away and taken care of. Shit, she'd been living on the streets practically alone since she was _seven_ , nobody had been taking care of her for a very long time, she knew how to get by around here far better than Carth did. If anything, _she_ was the one who needed to take care of _him_.

Or, she would say so if Cina weren't already handling him. She clearly hadn't spent all her time on a nice shiny core world, she knew how to take care of herself. Which was a little weird. Hadn't she said she'd spent all her time on Alderaan and...some planet Mission had forgotten the name of that was mostly farms? How exactly did she seem so comfortable on a city planet anyway?

Eh. Must be that weird brain stuff Mission couldn't quite wrap her head around. Not important.

The racers were all moving into position now, the array of overpowered repulsors setting her teeth to vibrating even all the way up here. There was a sudden increase of activity from the system, but a quick skim of the code determined it as just a last diagnostic, nothing really important. The count had already started, a holoprojector above the finish counting down from a minute. Cina and Asyr were hissing in Bothan over the line, no idea what that was, probably not anything important. (She could sample it and copy it into a translator, but she decided not to — there was _something_ going on between them, she had the feeling whatever it was would be private.) The count hit zero and, in a blink, the swoops all zipped into motion, shooting out of the staging area quicker than the eye could follow.

But computers were faster. She saw all of it.

The races the lower city gangs on Taris threw together were rather different than professional ones. For one thing, there were usually rather more participants relative to the width of the course — the official leaderboard had seventy-three spots, which was less than in a professional race, but the course narrowed to only a few meters wide in a couple places, and never spread to more than twenty or so. And there were far more obstacles in the way. Underground races, on the average, were _far_ more deadly than professional ones, and most of those accidents were in the opening moments, as the racers tried to force themselves somewhere in the pack without running into anything. Which also turned the opening stretch into a minefield for the next two laps, it never went well.

There were reasons she only _watched_ races, and never actually tried to convince the Beks to let her enter. She wasn't an idiot.

This race was no different. Only a handful of seconds had passed when sparks were already flying across one of her displays, staccato bursts of fire as racers were pushed off the narrow course against walls or bits of debris sticking up into the course. Mission kept a careful eye on one monitor, the one she'd set to track Asyr as closely as possible. (There were a few spots the cameras didn't reach, but she'd be able to eye her most of the course.) The sleek red-silver swoop had ended up in the middle of the pack somehow, which was a rather unsafe place to be — they were squished into tight formation, there wasn't a lot of room to maneuver. A crash at the left of the pack had the whole group shuffling right as they went, a few places bumping into each other, one just in front of Asyr swung around, the back was going to come right down on the tip of—

Asyr drifted right, rolling a bit left as she went. Just as she was about to hit the swoop next to her, she suddenly popped a few meters higher into the air and shot forward, clear over the one in front of her that had nearly pitched her into the ground. Mission grinned to herself — Asyr had used the repulsors to jump off another swoop, giving her both more height _and_ more speed, since the other one was moving too. It was enough to have her sailing over the next few ranks, zipping by in the narrow space between the pack and the bottom of a concourse overhead, sinking back to optimum height hard enough she scraped the ground for a second, a trail of sparks dancing in her wake, but she recovered smooth enough, now a couple lengths ahead of the main pack, already closing in on the leaders.

The swoop she'd used for a boost was less lucky, shoved into the ground, sent spinning and flipping. At least until another rammed into him, disappearing in a fireball shot with crackling electricity, growing as another smashed into it, then another. But that's how these things went sometimes. Asyr wasn't the only one to screw over another racer, they were down to fifty-four already.

But it looked like Asyr wasn't bad at this. Good choice — if she understood right, their other option had been Carth, and Mission really doubted he'd be ruthless enough to pull that kind of stunt. It was still early, but if she kept flying like that Asyr had a decent shot.

Mission straightened in her chair, hand coming up to one earbud. "Guys, I got Sith chatter about the race."

"Copy, Scope. Are they moving in?"

She took a long moment to listen, eyes tracking over the code scrolling by, only idly noting Asyr tick up a couple more spots. Finally, her chest loosened, tension she hadn't even consciously noticed melting away. "Negative, Pads. Sounds like they're watching, have bets riding on it. Skies still clear."

"How's Red doing? I can't even pick her out on this damn feed."

"Twin, Red. Just sit tight a few minutes." There was only the slightest whistle of wind under Asyr's rumbling voice, most of the air rushing by cut out by her helmet.

Mission glanced at the screen, Asyr and a few racers around her banking into a narrow tunnel. Asyr cut sharp into the turn, slipping in front of the one ahead of her, but coming into the tunnel at way too hard of an angle. She rolled, repulsors coming against the side wall of the tunnel just in time, riding sideways for a short bit before the tunnel swung back the other way, she slipped across the ceiling, passing another racer over his head, to the opposite wall before letting herself drift back right side up, locking onto the floor again. Damn. Yeah, Asyr was pretty good.

"I can out-fly a few untrained civs in a straight race. Trust me." And she didn't even sound nervous. Shooting around at a hundred meters a second, a single, tiny mistake all it would take to have her smash herself to death, and she didn't seem any more strained than she did sitting in their apartment eating breakfast, like this were no big deal. Rather less strained than she sounded just _going up stairs_ , with her injuries from her crash down planetside still bothering her.

Mission thought that was kind of funny. She'd never met one before, but apparently the stereotypes about Bothans were completely accurate.

By the time Asyr was coming around the first few curves of the second lap, Mission thought she mostly had the picture of it by now. She'd watched enough races to get a feel for how people flew pretty quickly. "Okay, Red, pass two more and you'll be in the top five." They needed to be in at least the top five to get into the winners' circle, close enough for Cina and Asyr to make a grab for Bastila. "You should be able to hold that no problem, the way you're flying. If you want to try to go for lead, watch the guy in the black and gold swoop. He's tricky. You could tail him and skip just before the finish, but be careful."

"Copy, Scope." Asyr smoothly ducked under a racer as he popped over a dip in the course, cutting into the next curve and putting her in sixth. "I'm covered, if you want to get set up."

Glancing toward the rifle waiting next to the window, Mission couldn't quite keep a pout from her face.

* * *

The bars of her tiny prison swung away, and arms were reaching for her, thick and hard and muscular. Bastila tried to twist away, but it was more reflex than anything. There was nowhere to run.

Hands took her above both elbows, hard and strong as steel, squeezing tight enough to bruise, dragged her forward. Her head spun, the dirty, asymmetrical arena carved out of the metal and plastic and ceramic of the lower city swirling around her. She fought to focus, fought to do _something_ , but the neural disruptor interfered far too much, it was a struggle just to remain standing. If she weren't bracketed by two large beings with very firm grips she'd probably be on the floor.

After long moments, blinking, squinting, she made out the figure making for her. The name of the species was eluding her at the moment — native to Hutt space, she knew that much — this particular one sharp and wicked-looking, scarred and cruel, spiking armored scales ringing eyes alight with black humor. This would be the winner of their bloody swoop race, she knew. The one who'd won her.

On any other day, this would be nothing. _He_ would be nothing. She could prevent him even taking notice of her, she could make him say or do anything she wanted, she could send him flying across the room, she could crush him like a bug under her heel. But this wasn't any other day. She could barely manage to stay on her feet, standing here in the humiliating little getup they'd forced her into, she could only glare back at him, trying to keep anything else from showing on her face.

There was absolutely nothing she could do. She was finished.

That was the very last thought she had before, in the blink of an eye, everything went completely insane.

It started with the harsh scream of a blaster, a single shot burning into the side of the winner's head, only a couple steps in front of her, close enough her stomach turned at the smell. There was a great clattering and hollering, people in all directions going for their weapons. Before anyone could respond, the two holding her were hit, toppling limp to the ground in eerie silence, taking her down with them. And then the sound of blasterfire was overwhelming, unbroken noise turning the air thick and sharp, her head rang with it.

She heard someone stepping up to her, she tried to pull away, but her head went swimming again, she was helpless to resist the yanking at her wrists, someone pulling her along by the cuffs binding her. She stumbled after whoever it was, more falling than walking, skinning her knees more than once. After some distance she couldn't count, she was pulled down to the ground, her shoulder coming to lean against something hard and cold.

She jumped at the sound of a blaster shot coming from far too close, almost deafening. There was a wave of heat against her hands, her arms, but it didn't hurt, she hadn't been hit. Bastila forced her eyes to focus again, looking down at her hands.

The blaster was right there, she spotted it just as it fired again — the shot hit the cord linking the cuffs, burned most of the rest of the way through. Another arm came under her forearms, a human arm, the blaster turned around in their hand, and it came smashing downward. Weakened from the shots, her arms braced against another, the cord snapped. Blinking in astonishment, Bastila glanced up to face her rescuer.

She went cold, in a tingling wave starting in her head and quickly working its way downward. For an instant, she was in one of her nightmares again, staring into eyes filled with an infinite, overwhelming emptiness, reaching out to drag her down with them. She knew that face, she knew it almost as well as she did her own these days.

 _Revan_.

Raised over the chaos surrounding them, blasters and repulsors and echoing explosions, her voice was hard and flat, and it was _wrong_ , it wasn't Cianen Hayal, it was _her_ — "Do you remember me, Shan?"

Before Bastila could even think to stop it, a shocked laugh bubbled up out of her chest. Oh, she remembered. She hadn't forgotten a thing, not a single thing.

Revan shot her a curious, suspicious sort of look, but they were interrupted again, another being sliding into a crouch against the wall on Bastila's opposite side. She noticed with no small surprise that the woman was a Bothan, the silver framing her cheeks faintly familiar. "Captain Lar'sym. Good to see you alive, Commander."

"Here, can you shoot?" The blaster was pressed into Bastila's hands before she could protest.

It occurred to her, slowly, that Revan had just given her a weapon. She'd even turned her back to Bastila, taking potshots around their cover with a rifle she hadn't noticed until just now. She didn't...

Bastila could kill her. Right now. At this range, she wasn't looking, she could shoot her in the back of the head, it'd be over in a blink, she couldn't—

She _could_ use a blaster, theoretically — she'd been taught the basic idea ages ago, though she'd never really had occasion to put it to use. But with the neural disruptor, "That might not be wise." She doubted she'd be able to shoot straight at the moment. "Could you get this thing off?" she asked tapping at the band of metal tight against the side of her temple.

Revan shook her head. "Afraid not. We'll get Scope to take a look when we get back." Then her voice shifted slightly, turning smoother, almost a drawl. Though Bastila couldn't understand a word of it, it wasn't Basic. She paused a moment, likely listening to a response, then turned back to Bastila and Lar'sym. "Red, back to your bike. Get up, Shan, we're getting out of here."

Looking back on Revan's chaotic little rescue mission, Bastila wouldn't be able to remember much of the next minutes. Not that she'd been entirely sure what was happening at the time. She couldn't see very well, the neural disruptor reducing her to a dizzy, stumbling mess, if Revan weren't dragging her along she'd have ended up bumping into walls.

Or just walking into blasterfire — it was a constant noise, a grating screeching of superheated air and boiling metal, sounding from above and around them, but fortunately little of it aimed their way. By the sound of it, a sizeable firefight had broken out through the staging area and among the racegoers, but the bulk of it away from the platform at the core, reserved for the staff managing the race, where Bastila had been kept the whole time. There had been a few people around, but they'd already fled or been downed, she tripped over a body more than once.

Swoop bikes and airspeeders roared by overhead, her skull vibrating from repulsors at full blast, a few hovering overhead, heavier shots slicing out into the blurry distance. They'd been stumbling along a short while, just a few meters from the lift down, when Revan suddenly dove forward, dragging Bastila tumbling roughly to the floor. They'd rolled into a wall, blocking off that direction, but there was someone standing _right there_ , she was already turning her blaster down toward Bastila, and—

A shot struck the woman in the head, she went limp and lifeless instantly. By the shape of the burned wreck carved into her skull, that shot had come from the towers above. Snipers? The scale of the fight going on out there, and now snipers, just how many people had Revan brought with her? Not that Bastila was particularly surprised, she didn't think Revan believed in overkill.

The next instant, a blackened, glowing trench was carved into the floor of the platform, an airspeeder swooping by overhead. Bastila noticed the strafing fire had cut right into where they would have been if Revan hadn't dragged them down.

That chill stole over her again, ice dripping down her spine. That speeder had come from _behind_ them, coming too fast. Revan couldn't possibly have seen it.

 _No_ , she shouldn't be able to— It should have lasted _longer_ than—

Revan yanked her to her feet again, dragged her into the lift. The ride downward only lasted a couple seconds, Revan replacing her rifle's power cell as they went with all the smooth efficiency of a veteran soldier. The door swung open with a ping, and she started forward—

Only to duck back in, dragging Bastila around the edge, plasma flooding through the doors to hit the back wall of the lift, dozens of blaster shots incinerating the metal, she lifted an arm to shield her face from the rain of sparks. Over the cacophony, Bastila could barely hear Revan at all, despite standing right at her shoulder, barking an order.

A few seconds later, there was a quick series of low noises somewhere between a pop and a thud, and the rain of blasterfire cut off. Revan grabbed Bastila's free hand, moved her fingers to her belt at her back. "Quickly, hold on."

Revan charged out of the lift, the edge of the course under the platform, Bastila holding on and struggling just to not fall over. There had been a crowd of armed beings down here, looked to be dozens, but someone had thrown down a rain of concussion grenades, they were all knocked from their feet, dazed, drunkenly grasping for their weapons. Revan picked through the field of bodies, occasionally firing a shot into one moving too quickly.

Before long she was turning, leading Bastila down into a garage of some kind, judging by the sharp smell of plastic and hydraulics. The noise of blasterfire was even thicker in the enclosed space, heavy on the air — the battle reached down here too. Instead of trying to force their way through, Revan pulled her into a dingy little side room. Might have been a guard station a few hundred years ago, but now it was filled with discarded speeder parts in a puddle of noxious fluids, the fumes were eye-watering. Bastila ducked as close to the door as possible, covering her nose and trying to hold her breath.

Revan was talking into her wrist again, giving orders to her unseen companions. "This is Pads, package secured at launch, green. Twin Hunt, break now, pick up Scope. Heavy, your call. Red, you up?"

"I do hope you have some plan to get us out of—"

Most of her attention on a datapad strapped to her forearm, Revan only cut her the shortest, most disdainful glance before talking into her com again. "Launch in fifteen. See you at home." Revan dropped her hand, turned a look on her. A familiar look, the same one Hayal had given her half the time on the _Spire_ , an offended, condescending sort of glare. "I'd think someone getting rescued should be a little more grateful. I have no obligation to be here, you know."

Bastila had absolutely no idea what to say to that. Instead she just glared back.

She'd been struggling to find something to say in her own defense for a few seconds when Revan grabbed at her again, yanking Bastila in her wake out of the little room. They stepped out into the gaping entrance of the garage even as an empty speeder pulled up, coasting to a stop right in front of them. Revan practically threw Bastila into the back seat — her elbow hit the edge of a seat rather hard, her hand going numb and tingling — then jumped in behind the controls. A high electric whine ringing in Bastila's ears as the repulsors cycled up, Revan disentangled herself from the strap of her rifle, tossed it carelessly back in Bastila's direction. "Fire at anyone following us. Try not to hit Asyr, she'll be on a red and black swoop."

"You can't expect me to shoot with any real accuracy with this thing still—" The airspeeder jumped forward, driving Bastila back into her seat, forcing the air from her lungs. They shot through the arena in the space of a second or two, the firefight nothing but a colorful blur below them. With a twitch that pitched Bastila onto her side, they dove into the maze of the lower city, craggy forms of permacrete and durasteel whipping past to either side faster than she could really make out.

Revan risked a quick glance back at her, lips curled in a little smirk. "Oh, and you might want to hold onto something."

The airspeeder rolled nearly ninety degrees, for a heart-stopping moment Bastila was sure she was about to topple out into the open air — which was ridiculous, all but the simplest speeders had safety features to prevent that sort of thing — but the force of the turn, arcing around a corner into another valley, pressed her into her seat hard enough there was no real danger of that. Over the next minutes Revan carved a meandering path through the maze of monolithic obstacles, blasting around towers and through gaps in concourses and catwalks at absolutely terrifying speed.

They'd gone some distance, slowly climbing their way toward the surface, when Bastila heard a heavier whine of higher-power repulsors coming from behind. Her fingers tight on the foreign rifle, she turned in her seat, tracking the swoop bike coming up on their right. She'd been an instant away from firing when Revan's earlier warning finally registered. "Is that Lar'sym?"

Slowing their dangerous flight somewhat, Revan fiddled with the console for a moment. "Asyr. We get away clean?"

The Bothan's voice hissed from the speakers built into the speeder, crackling only slightly with distortion. "A couple speeders tried to follow you, but they weren't a problem."

Bastila was sure they weren't. Between an experienced Republic starfighter pilot originally trained by the Bothan military and a few random gangsters, she didn't think there was any doubt which would come out alive.

"Ah, well, good then." Revan sounded rather surprised by the lack of pursuit — given the chaos it'd sounded like they were leaving behind them, Bastila would have been shocked if they'd managed to muster much at all. "I have Shan, we're on our way home. Everyone report."

The first voice to respond was high and thin, a girl, hardly more than a child. "We're good. Zee took a couple grazes, but they aren't nothing, he'll be fine."

"We managed to get away clean, I'm told we'll be at our speeder in five."

Bastila recognized the voice instantly. A sense of relief stole over her, a smile pulling at her lips. "Onasi? Was that Carth Onasi?"

Her voice dripping sarcasm, Revan said, "Sounds like you have a fan, Flyboy. The Jedi's wetting herself over here."

The glare she sent the back of Revan's head might have a little less heat to it than she would have liked, but she couldn't really help it. A pessimistic voice at the back of her head had been certain this "rescue" was merely taking her out of one hopeless situation and putting her into another. Because, Revan wasn't wrong: she had no particular obligation to be here. Bastila couldn't trust her to help her get back to the Republic. She wasn't certain she could trust her not to shoot her in the back.

(She could kill her. Right now. At this range, she wasn't looking, she could shoot her in the back of the head, it'd be over in a blink, she couldn't—)

Ordinarily, any captain from Starfighter Command might have been some reassurance, but she'd still had doubt. Lar'sym was a good officer, of course, but she was Bothan. The Bothans were _allied_ with the Republic, but they weren't truly part of it — as far as they were concerned, their first and last duty was to their own people, and Bastila didn't know Lar'sym enough to know if she had any personal loyalty. If Lar'sym thought siding with Revan, even if she decided to hand Bastila over to the Sith, was better for the Bothans in the long run, Bastila couldn't predict which way she would go. Especially since Lar'sym seemed to be following Revan's lead, no, she couldn't count on her.

It was a well-kept secret in the Republic that the Bothans had nearly signed a formal treaty with the Sith very early in the war. So far, they'd managed to keep it limited to certain intelligence officers, command staff, and Jedi. There was no telling what the political fallout would be if the media got wind of _that_.

But Onasi? Onasi she trusted. They didn't get along very well — honestly, Bastila had trouble talking to most everyone outside the Order she'd ever met — but they mostly saw eye-to-eye on principle. If Onasi were the one running the show, she might just get off Taris alive.

Bastila checked back into the conversation in time to catch an unfamiliar voice, low and gruff. "—hell of a fight, back there. Almost feel bad for checking out early."

A grin on her voice, Revan said, "I promise I'll call you next time I plan on starting something."

"Actually, I might have a proposition of my own for you. Keep the second half of my payment, and we'll call it trading favors. I'll find you after I'm done washing the blood out."

"Right, then. _Ret'urche vi, ni burcha._ "

" _Koyachi._ "

Silence fell over the line, but only for the moment. Onasi said, sounding more amused than uneasy, "Am I the only one who finds Cina and the Mando's flirting a little creepy?"

Bastila jumped — _Mandalorian?_ They had a _Mandalorian_ working with them? Had they gone _completely insane?_

Lar'sym opened the channel early, a few seconds filled only with the low chuffing of alien laughter. "If you think that's bad, never watch one of our romantic comedies. I suspect they aren't quite fit for human consumption."

"Ah, I've only seen _Hjisthe aan shorak_ and _Cakhine rrokul_ , but I thought they were pretty good." Somehow, Bastila wasn't at all surprised to learn that Revan spoke Bothan, and had apparently watched Bothan holos in her spare time.

"You don't count as human, _hjanethe_."

"Aw, _hjAsythe_ , I'm touched."

"Yeah, I'm with the Bothan on this one. You two flirting is somehow even creepier."

"Green is a bad color on you, Flyboy."

"I thought you said orange was my bad color."

"No no, see, you have no good colors."

Bastila sat back listening to the three banter on, and on. Luckily, no one was paying any particular attention to her, because she doubted she could very effectively keep the scowl from her face.

Somehow she just knew this was a bad sign.

* * *

Cina was pretty sure there was something somewhere in the Jedi Code against taking inordinately long showers. Granted, Cianen had only perused the thing out of academic curiosity, but she had the feeling this sort of indulgence was something the Jedi would have a problem with. Though, Jedi "asceticism" was a huge fucking joke, that wasn't really the point.

She was really just hoping Shan would get out here so she could get out of this awkward conversation.

"I understand, Zaalbar, I really do." The approximation of the young Wookiee's name still sounded offensively wrong to her ears — she'd taken her cue on how to pronounce it from Mission, but it was radically different from the proper Shyriiwook. She felt uncomfortable every time she said it. "And I'm not saying I don't appreciate all you, and Mission, have done for us. It's just a little...complicated."

Zaalbar shot her what she (somehow) recognized as a flat, unamused look, fingers absently clicking against the surface of the table. "I'm afraid I can't see what should be so complicated. Our debt is not yet paid."

"You were a good deal of help down there, Zaalbar." At least, she _assumed_ he had been. Distracted getting Shan to the garage alive, she hadn't really been paying that much attention to the rest of the battle. It must have gone according to plan. What with them not being dead.

"My contribution was relatively small, all things considered. In any case, even were I uniquely responsible for your surviving that encounter, it would not cancel our debt. The hunt was entirely your idea. If you willingly put the two of us in potential danger, it does not count."

Cina winced — she'd known that, of course. Perhaps she'd simply been hoping Zaalbar wouldn't. Which was rather silly, when she thought about it, since he was the actual Wookiee here. Seriously, why _did_ she know so much about their traditions? That got stranger and stranger the more she thought about it.

"I don't see what the big deal is either." Mission was sitting in a spot next to Zaalbar, tinkering with the neural disruptor half-disassembled across the table in front of her. It'd only taken a few short minutes for Mission to figure out how to get it off Shan. Of course, Mission being Mission, she'd been playing with it ever since. "I mean, do you want to get rid of us that much? We'll just keep hanging around, the debt'll get paid eventually."

"It's _really_ not that simple."

"Yeah, why not, though?"

Carth chose that moment to jump in. Smiling over his cup of caf, looking a little too pleased with himself, he said, "We're not staying on Taris, kid."

" _Don't_ call me—"

"Now that we have Bastila, we're getting off this rock as soon as we possibly can. We're simply not going to be here for Zaalbar to pay off this debt of his."

For a couple seconds, the two of them just stared at Carth, eye wide and slowly blinking. Then they turned to each other, hands flicking in turn in what Cina instantly recognized as RSL. Cina understood sign, of course, but this was obviously meant to be a private conversation. She leaned in toward Carth, turning away from the silent discussion across the table. "Could you cut it out with the 'kid' stuff?" she whispered. "She really hates it."

His brow lowered in a light frown. "She's what, fourteen? I don't know how they do things on Shelkonwa, but..." He sounded almost disappointed, as though he'd expected better moral judgement from her.

Which was just so bloody hypocritical she couldn't help glaring at him a bit. "Carth, she's _literally_ killed people for us." He winced at that, one hand rising to rub at his cheek. "She may be young, but she's not a kid. Taris never allowed her to be. So cut it out. Okay?"

He didn't say anything, eyes unfocused and expression stricken, his thoughts clearly on something else. But he did nod, so she considered that an issue settled.

Mission and Zaalbar were still signing at each other, Cina quite consciously looking anywhere but in their direction, when the bathroom door finally opened. A glance over her shoulder and there Shan was, looking far more like herself. The clothes were wrong, of course, simple trousers and tunic in muted colors Cina had picked up for her in head of time. She'd guessed Shan's size from memory, and she'd gotten pretty close — the trousers were a bit tight around her hips, but she'd clearly been able to get them on, so close enough.

It was more in how she held herself than anything. That quintessentially Jedi sort of bearing, self-assurance so overwhelming it edged more than a little into arrogance, a subtle sense of superiority in her eyes, as though looking down her nose at they silly, Force-blind children. There were reasons ordinary people didn't like Jedi so much, just being in a room with one could be annoying sometimes.

Cina frowned — wait, she'd decided just yesterday she must have been a Jedi before the mind-wipe. She... She hadn't been anything like Shan, or most of the other Jedi she'd met. Had she? She somehow couldn't imagine herself being so... She didn't know what word she was looking for. It just felt wrong somehow, Shan-ifying herself in her head.

Shan was naturally irritating, but Cina should _try_ to be nice anyway. She had just gone through what had to have been a fairly traumatic experience. "There's food in the oven, and there should still be some caf left."

"I don't drink caf." Amazing, how much smug superiority one person could cram into a statement so short and mundane.

Cina did try to keep the annoyance off her face. She didn't think she did very well, but she _did_ try. "Fine, then, drink the bottled water — I wouldn't touch the tap, if I were you."

There was a short moment, barely a flinch, something else breaking through Shan's detached Jedi mask. Something fragile, something vulnerable, something...frightened. But then it was gone, so quickly it might not have been there at all.

But it had been, Cina had seen it. She knew, quite suddenly, that whatever the Jedi had done to her Shan was in the know. Shan knew who Cina used to be.

She knew, and she was _afraid_ of her.

Shite, now she had to try even harder to be nice...

"Right, we're going with you then."

Cina blinked, tore her eyes away from Bastila back to Mission. The girl was grinning again, that way she had where she was practically glowing, wide enough Cina caught the tips of pointed teeth. (She must have picked that up from humans, Twi'leks didn't natively show their teeth in non-threatening expressions.) "I'm sorry, what?"

"We're going with you, when you leave the planet. Me and Zee."

"You've got to be kidding me," Carth groaned, one hand coming up to rub at his forehead. For her part, Asyr looked equally exasperated, though she'd apparently decided it wasn't her business, focusing the bulk of her attention on her datapad.

For a long moment, Cina sat back, mostly ignoring the increasing volume of the argument growing between Mission and Carth. (It mostly seemed to consist of childish insults, she wasn't missing anything.) That proposition was...complicated. In an ordinary situation, she might have gone along with it, if for no other reason because she'd be able to get the both of them — who were, as much as they would argue the point, essentially children — out of what were very unstable, exploitative living conditions. Maybe fly back to Alderaan and sponsor them for refugee status, that sounded like a brilliant idea.

But...well, Cianen Hayal wasn't real. She had no idea what would happen if she tried to go back to the University. Cianen did exist _legally_ , of course — she probably could sponsor them anyway, or just outright adopt them, that would skip all the hoops in the process and give them instant Alderaanian citizenship — but there wasn't really a life waiting for her back in Aldera.

The problem was, she had no idea what was going to happen after Taris. She definitely had to talk to Shan about what was going on, but she had a feeling the Jedi would demand... _something_ from her, she couldn't guess what at the moment. Getting off Taris wouldn't be the end of it, was the point.

She had absolutely no idea what she might be dragging them into. It was complicated.

"You will not be coming with us."

Cina focused back on her surroundings to find Mission glaring at Shan, the expression almost impressively toxic, considering how sweet and cheerful the girl usually was. "Hey, do I go sticking my nose in your business?"

Her voice forced flat and casual, as though defining fundamental terminology in an introductory syntax course full of hungover first-year undergrads, Cina said, "Sticking their noses into other people's business is roughly ninety-five percent of everything Jedi do with their time."

Most of the rest of the table looked less than impressed with her little joke, but Mission broke into scandalised giggles, so she'd define that one a success.

Shan seemed to be trying to pretend she hadn't heard Cina at all. But she didn't miss the slight scrunching of her nose, the narrowing of her eyes, as though she could smell something awful but was trying to not draw attention to it. "I don't know how you've handled this operation in my absence," she said, directed more to Carth than anyone, "but the Republic does not condone pressing into service civilians and children or the hiring of Mandalorian mercenaries."

Astoundingly, Mission didn't say anything to that, her jaw working in silence, face caught somewhere between offense and confusion — if Cina had to guess, she couldn't decide which part she wanted to yell at Shan about first.

Cina was equally flabbergasted, Asyr ended up getting to it first. Not even deigning to lift her eyes from whatever she was reading, she grumbled, "I hope you realize, Master Jedi, that without the assistance of _civilian children and Mandalorian mercenaries_ we would have been hard-pressed to get anywhere near you. Perhaps you would rather not have been rescued, our mistake."

In a transparent attempt to hide her irritation, Shan forced out a haughty scoff. "You call _that_ a rescue?"

"Given the resources available to us, I can't imagine anyone could have done much better." Cina shot Carth a quick look. Was he actually defending her? That was weird, he'd spent the whole bloody time they've been on this planet complaining, saying she was— "Granted, I can't help but feel she's completely insane half the time, but it's always worked out in the end." Ah, there it was.

"If that chaos is the best you can envis..." Shan's voice slowly trailed off. Eyes flicking to Cina, slow and dead, " _She_... Hayal was in command."

Cina shrugged. "I don't know if I'd call it that, but I've been the one coming up with all the ideas, yeah. Turns out the Republic military doesn't teach its people basic problem solving."

Chuckling under his breath, Carth said, "Cina, there is nothing 'basic' about your problem solving."

"It worked, didn't it?"

"I'm just saying, starting a gang war to give you cover for a rescue mission isn't what I would call 'basic'. You keep things interesting, I'll give you that, but there is nothing linear about however you thought up of that."

She shrugged — that was just basic logic. They hadn't the numbers to fight them all outright, and the lower city had essentially already been in the middle of a low-key turf war for years. The gangs hadn't mixed at their makeshift arena, they'd all kept to their own. The obvious solution was to place her people here and there in the middle of as many of the gangs as she could, and have each of them fire all at once into one of their neighbors; in the heat of the moment, they would all think they were being attacked by a rival gang, and respond accordingly. Once they'd had the fight started, they'd just had to defend themselves and stay out of the fucking way.

After all, the rank and file members of these gangs cared _far_ more about their own feuds than they did holding on to a prize of dubious value only one of them would get to keep. The math was quite simple, really.

But defending her methods wasn't really her priority at the moment. Shan had reacted to the news that she was in charge very...well, strangely. She was staring at Cina, her eyes wide, lips slightly parted, looking almost... It was very subtle, Cina couldn't be entirely sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. But, if she had to put a word to it, something about the idea left Shan quietly horrified.

After a few moments, choking back a gulp of water and shifting in her seat, the Jedi managed to collect herself. "Regardless, I am the commanding officer of this mission, and—"

"You ain't the commanding nothing of _this_ Mission."

Cina didn't quite manage to suffocate a laugh. Clearly, her punning had been a terrible influence.

"You're a prissy, ungrateful little, _sleemo_ , you know that? And I thought Jedi were supposed to be _nice_."

"You don't know what you're talking about, child. I—

"Really, you should be thanking Cina, you owe her your stupid life. She's not Republic, she didn't have to be down there saving your selfish ass—"

She was trying to hide it, but by the tension in her jaw and her shoulders Shan was starting to get seriously annoyed. "Your presence here is no longer necessary. I don't know how Hayal managed to coerce you into—"

"Coerce!" Mission, on the other hand, was doing absolutely nothing to hide her own anger. She'd even jumped up to her feet, her chair clattering down to the floor behind her, fists clenched at her side and lekku starting to darken with a flush. Even Zaalbar looked like he was getting fed up with the Jedi, fur along his shoulders rising and dark eyes twinkling with silent rage. "Listen, you spice-mad black-blooded _scum-sucking slag_ ," she snarled in Huttese, then, switching back to Basic, "we weren't coerced into _nothing!_ We _volunteered_ to help Cina, and without me she never would have even _found_ you, me and Cina are the only reason you're not stuck with Qraknee being raped to death right now, so _shut your fucking—!"_

"Mission." Miraculously, the girl cut off at the sound of her name, eyes flicking over to Cina, looking almost sheepish. "I need to talk to you two about something, but first we need to finish up here. Why don't you both go wait in my room. Second door on the right," she said, pointing over to the hall leading further into the apartment.

After another short moment of glaring at the Jedi, the pair shuffled off, muttering to each other low enough Cina couldn't pick it out. Fingers folded behind his head, Carth let out a low whistle. "That kid's a pain the ass sometimes, but I gotta admit she's got spunk."

Asyr snorted. "Well, you're not wrong."

And they didn't even speak Huttese. "Anyway, we were saying..." Cina turned to Shan; she was staring after Mission, her face blank, though an emptier sort of blankness than she usually went for. Less self-righteous, more shaken. "You want to be in charge? Go right ahead, Master Jedi, be my guest. So, how _do_ you intend to get us off-planet?"

Shan just stared at her for a moment, blinking. "Ah, we will need a ship, of course."

"That shouldn't be a problem," Asyr said, her tone deceptively light. (Cina would bet Asyr had spotted the same dilemma she had.) "I'm certain we could steal a suitable one without too much difficulty."

Astoundingly, Shan looked uncomfortable with the thought of jacking themselves proper transportation, shifting awkwardly in her seat. Bloody Jedi, honestly, did she _want_ to be captured and tortured? "I suppose. Once we're up—"

"The Sith blockade will reduce us to plasma before we even get out of atmo."

Shan snapped back to her — the shocked offense on her face, Cina had to bite her lip to keep herself from bursting into laughter. "I assumed we would simply run the blockade..."

"In a ship large enough to carry all of us?" Asyr shook her head, the fur on her face softly shivering with amusement. "I could maybe make a break for hyperspace in a one-person snubfighter, but in a larger craft we'll be dust before we get anywhere close."

Wincing, Carth said, "Yeah, I'm afraid I have to agree with Lar'sym. There's no way we're flying out of here. Best chance I see, we just have to lie low until the blockade's over."

Cina shook her head. "No good. If Mission could identify Shan through the net, you can be sure the Sith know she's here somewhere. She's probably the only reason they haven't lifted the blockade already. They'll keep the planet on lockdown until they have her."

"The planet isn't completely quarantined. They would still have their own people moving up and down." Shan glanced between the three of them, pretending as though she weren't looking for confirmation. "Perhaps if we stole one of their transports—"

"They'd report it quicker than we can kill the whole crew."

"Besides, their landing craft won't be hyperdrive-equipped. It won't get us out of the system."

Shan's lip curled for a moment with annoyance before once again vanishing behind a curtain of Jedi placidity. "Could we remove their transponder and plant it in a ship of our choosing?"

Asyr actually considered that one for a second, her datapad drooping a bit and her eyes narrowing. "Well, just the transponder wouldn't be enough. They would query the navcomputer, so you'd need to take that too. Whatever ship you transplanted it to would have to have systems compatible with that particular model, and since their landing craft aren't intended for hyperspace travel..." She shrugged. "That's possible, I suppose. But you'd need to rewire the ship to support two parallel computer systems, one linked into the coms and the other the primaries. That'd take a week at least — longer, since we don't have a professional tech on hand."

"Which is far too long, of course," Cina said. "Assuming the crew don't report it immediately, you have a window of _maybe_ a couple hours before they flag the I.D. Even just taking the transponder, you might not have long enough to wire it in."

"Not to mention Imperial military systems are all encrypted. The rest of the ship's systems will crash immediately when you try to use it."

Shan was going oddly pale, her fingers tapping at the table. "Maybe if we just copy the recognition codes onto a different ship..."

Rolling her eyes, Cina said, "Yeah, nice try, but no. We could strip them from an Imperial ship but, again, that'll be reported long before we're done. Your best bet would be to register a new I.D., but the only place on-planet you could possibly do that is their planetary command centre, right above our heads. Even assuming we had the numbers to break in and hold the place long enough to get what we need — which we really, _really_ don't — they would _definitely_ notice that. We'd end up pinned under enough firepower to incinerate the whole tower by the time we're finished."

What she didn't mention was that they did have a slicer on hand who _might_ be able to pull off what they needed without even stepping foot in the building. Mission had said she had experience playing with Imperial code, after all. But Shan didn't even want Mission involved, Cina wasn't going to bring her up. At least not until after Shan admitted she had no bloody clue what she was doing.

Seriously, Cina had a better understanding of the problem and she couldn't even remember learning all this shite.

"Any other brilliant ideas, Commander?" There might have been more than a hint of sarcasm on Cina's voice saying the title.

Shan did seem to be giving up already. She'd leaned forward, a hand against her forehead propping her up. She let out a long, exhausted sigh, her voice peculiarly unsteady. If Cina didn't know better, she would almost suspect Shan was _having feelings_ , but this was a Jedi she was talking about, so she must be mistaken.

Though, being the only nice person in the room, Carth didn't let her wallow very long. "This is why you had advisors with you on the task force, Bastila. There's no shame admitting you don't know something. Nobody expects any Jedi to know these things."

Cina smirked. "I don't know, I can think of a few exceptions. Off the top of my head, oh, Revan, maybe?" Onasi and Shan both shot her absolutely venomous glares, she shrugged back. "I'm right and you know it. It's not my fault you have the arrogance to think you can command a fleet without educating yourself on basic military practices first."

" _Hjanethe_ , you are not helping."

"Right, sorry. I'll be nice." She wasn't sorry at all, of course, but Shan had clearly gotten the message by now. She knew to stop kicking someone when they're down.

* * *

" _Finally_ , what was taking you so—" Mission cut off, her eyes bulging almost comically wide. "Ah, hi, Canderous. What's up?"

Waving Kandosa in behind her, Cina said, "Canderous has a plan to get us all off-planet. I was wondering if you could help us work out the kinks."

Kandosa gave Mission, sitting cross-legged on Cina's borrowed bed, a long, evaluating stare. The girl shifted under the Mandoade's gaze, which she couldn't really blame her for — Kandosa had quite a stare, and he was a bloody intimidating man to begin with. Tall and broad-shouldered, muscular but compact, bare arms littered with scars from blades and blasters and blotches that looked curiously like the results of a caustic chemical spill, he certainly looked like the kind of bloke who would tear your throat out as soon as blink.

But his face, no matter how rigid his expression and merciless his eyes, was missing even the slightest hint of malice. "You're Scope? The slicer?" Kandosa's voice was low and gruff, though without the note of doubt someone else might have had.

"Oh, yeah." Mission was frowning to herself, probably realised just that second she and Kandosa had never actually met face-to-face before. "Um, what kinks?"

Turning to Cina and switching to Mandoa, Kandosa muttered, "She sounded young, but I didn't think she was _this_ young."

Cina shrugged. "I trust her."

His only response to that was a slow, solemn nod. "Alright, _ad'ika_. I've taken a liking to Davik's ship. Wanna help me steal it?"

Mission's eyes went wide again, her mouth dropping open. Even Zaalbar had dropped the bit of machinery he was tinkering with — he did always seem to be doing that — staring at Kandosa with an equally blank expression. After some long silent seconds, her eyes slowly drifted over to Cina. "Is this for real? We're gonna steal Davik Kang's ship? Seriously?"

"That's the plan." Cina's lips tilted into a smirk. "You in?"

" _Fuck yes_ , I'm in!" Mission jumped, her hand snapping up to cover her mouth. "Stang," she muttered, the word coming out rather muffled. She reached into a pocket, pulled out a credit chit, flicked it over toward Zaalbar. He smoothly caught it, slipped it into a pouch on his belt without a word.

Cina had to bite the inside of her lip to keep the smile off her face.

"I can get us to the ship no problem," Kandosa was saying, seemingly unaffected by the moment of adorableness. (But, Mandoade.) "What I can't do is get the recognition codes to get us through the blockade. I was hoping you could help with that."

Her face sinking into a frown, Mission leaned back a bit to stare up at the ceiling, fingers of one hand tapping idly at her lip. "I mean...maybe? I'd need to register new codes, right?"

Cina nodded. "That would be safest, yes."

"Sure, I _should_ be able to do that. I've already cracked most of the Imp encrypts, it shouldn't take more than a half hour or so. Getting at 'em in the first place will be the problem. I'd need into the central system, there's no access from the outside."

"Their computers are on a wireless network." Kandosa seemed strangely certain of that...

"Yeah, but it's not on the net. I mean, their internal network is isolated from the holonet, physically, you can't slice in. And the building is shielded and everything. Maybe we can cut in somewhere near the bottom, but they'd have to be pretty stupid to not notice that."

"Wait." The two of them turned to look at her, Kandosa with a single dark eyebrow expectantly raised. (The one with the claw marks cut through it, actually, hard not to notice.) "Kandosa, can you get inside the building?"

His head tilted a little. "Davik has an arrangement with the locals. I sometimes act as an intermediary with certain contacts. Yes, I can get in the building, but I think bringing Scope in with me might raise a few eyebrows."

"Do you carry a com?"

"Oh!" An ecstatic grin spreading across her face, Mission was bouncing a little in excitement, the old bed creaking a little with each dip. "You got one? Lemme see it." With a quick look at Cina, a tolerant smile twitching at his lips, he unclipped a plain, innocuous-looking com from his belt, handed it over. Mission fiddled with the thing for a little bit, occasionally tapping at the pad strapped to her wrist. "Ah ha, _perfect_. You mind if I keep this for, ah, an hour and a half, maybe? Not enough memory to download all the files we'll need. It'll still work when I'm done."

"Hold up a sec." Mission blinked up at Kandosa, her fingers defensively tightening around the com. "I thought you said the building was shielded. You can't skip across my com to do your slicing if the signal's blocked."

"No, see, the _net_ signal is blocked, coms get through just fine. They have to, so they can talk to all their little Sith all over the planet."

"Then why do you need to download the files to the com? Couldn't you just send them out to you?"

"Well," Mission muttered, shuffling a little, "ah, I don't _need_ to. But they should be monitoring the com traffic coming in and out. Not actively listening, but tracking the bandwidth and stuff. Slicing in probably won't be noticed, but broadcasting _that_ much data? If I were the one designing their system, I would have that trip an alarm automatically. Now, I don't _know_ if it will, but, I thought, just in case."

"Just in case," Kandosa agreed, with another slow nod. "Do what you need, but you'll owe me a new one if you break it."

"Not gonna break it. But sure."

Kandosa gave the girl another serious nod. Then, so smoothly one would think he wasn't changing the subject at all, he turned to Cina. "Javyar's?"

She felt her eyebrows wander up her forehead. Was he really suggesting they go to the cantina just for the hell of it? That seemed oddly...un-Mandoa. They generally didn't do things just for the hell of it. But she shrugged her confusion off. "Sure. I just need a minute with these two quick, and I'll be down."

With a last nod, Kandosa turned on his heel and walked out of the room. Man of few words, this one. (But, Mandoade.)

Apparently, Mission had checked out of the conversation as soon as she had permission to tinker with Kandosa's com. She already had a bundle of tiny little electronics tools spread out across the bed — must have had them hidden away somewhere, Cina hadn't seen her reach for them — half of the com's casing already removed to reveal the tangled innards. Honestly, she couldn't even pretend to be surprised. Mission was an excitable kid, couldn't expect her to hold it in when she had a new toy to play with.

At least Zaalbar was paying attention. But then, he was always paying attention.

"We need to talk, about you two coming with us."

Mission twitched, wide eyes jumping up to hers. "Oh! Yeah, right." She placed the partially-disassembled com on the surface of the bed, every movement slow and gentle. "But, there's really not anything to talk about. We're coming with." It was said with confident assertion, yet with a hint of confrontation, as though at once stating a fundamental fact of the universe and a low _you got a problem with that?_

Cina had to bite the inside of her lip to keep herself from smiling again. This girl was just so adorable sometimes. (Twi'lek, yes, she was blaming it on that, Twi'leks were unfairly adorable in general.) "Not particularly, no." Mission and Zaalbar were far better company than Carth and Shan, at least. "I simply want to make sure what you're getting into. I have no idea if or when I'll ever be getting back to Taris. If you stick with me, it could months, years before you ever have the chance to come back."

"That's fine." Shrugging to herself a little Mission said, "It's not like either of us really have anything here worth sticking around for, you know? Zaalbar, he just got here a few years ago, and he really hardly even talks to anyone besides me. And, well, I _used_ to have a brother here, but he ran off, I don't even know which planet he's on these days. Or if he's even still alive. I got a few friends with the Beks, yeah, but no one I'll be too sorry to miss even if I never come back.

"Um, honestly," she said, eyes sheepishly darting away, "me and Zee have been looking for a good opportunity to get off-world for a while now. That's what I wanted the credits from the sabaac game for in the first place, we've been saving up to buy a place on some nice backwater world, or our own ship maybe. Even without Zee's lifedebt going on, we might have tried to weasel our way along."

Shooting the back of Mission's head a surly look, Zaalbar grumbled, "I do not weasel."

Mission rolled her eyes. "Alright, fine, _I_ would try to weasel our way along. Just, don't get all guilty about dragging us along, yeah? Timing could be better, but we want to come. Give me a couple days to clone our accounts and my library where I can get at it off-world, and we're good."

Thinking ahead to this conversation, Cina had expected...she didn't know, for there to be at least _some_ reluctance on Mission's part to leave everything and everyone (except Zaalbar) she knew behind. It was just a normal person reaction to this sort of situation, one would think.

She remembered, when Cianen had left Shelkonwa for the University, it'd been in a very conflicted state of mind. There hadn't been a whole lot for her on Shelkonwa — she hadn't belonged there, she'd always been too...too bookish, too contrary, her hometown had just been too small for her. The whole damn planet had just been too small for her. And it wasn't a whole lot of people who landed a scholarship at the home campus in Aldera, as they were one of the premier educational institutions in the entire sodding galaxy and could afford to be extremely selective. But on the other hand, she _had_ lived there her whole life, it was everything she'd ever known, she'd only seen Aldera in holos before, read about it in books. And, as much as they might fight, she _did_ love her family...

...was what she _remembered_ thinking, but now that she thought back on it the feeling wasn't really there. She remembered Cianen's parents, her siblings and cousins, of course she remembered them, it hadn't even been that long since she'd seen them. (She did at least try to get back for the holidays.) But, she remembered their faces, she remembered _everything_ , and she...

She felt nothing.

Because the memories were empty, they weren't _real_. Cianen didn't exist, her family didn't exist. The person she'd once been did have family of some kind out there somewhere, she knew that — a few things she'd thought or said here or there certainly hinted at that. But she hardly remembered anything about them. She'd come up with the name of a single cousin, she was pretty sure she had at least one brother, she _vaguely_ remembered a rough outline of what her father might have looked like. That was all she had.

She might not remember what her parents looked like, or anything about them at all, no more than a few brief flashes of her entire childhood, but feelings came through a little better. It was quite clear to her that she had _not_ been on good terms with her family. She couldn't remember what that had been about, but...

Actually, come to think of it, she might have a theory. She'd guessed by now that she'd almost certainly been a Jedi. From the _very_ few foggy memories she had, she suspected her parents had had absolutely no idea what to do about her and her magic powers. Perhaps she'd been sent to the Jedi against her will, and she'd never forgiven them for it.

Which did seem a little silly to her. She meant, with how old she was that had to have been, what, twenty years ago? more? To still be worked up over it seemed a bit...petty.

Anyway, before she'd gotten distracted, the point had been that she would have expected Mission's willingness to leave Taris behind to come as a surprise to her, to feel...she didn't know, pity, maybe. But, in the moment, it was just... Well, it was just what it was.

She understood perfectly, such a perspective felt natural to her, and that realisation was rather confusing. Just what she _been_ like, before the Jedi fucked with her head?

With a sense of sinking dread, Cina abruptly remembered there was someone on hand who might actually be able to tell her. About who she had been, about _everything_. But that meant she had to have a personal conversation with Bastila bloody Shan.

Son of a bitch. That was just perfect.

* * *

 _Kandosa — Canderous's name in Mandoa. Will be used in sections narrated by Cina or Canderous himself._

 _Mir'osiksii_ — _This is pieced together from canon Mandoa._ Mir'osik _translates to "shit for brains";_ sii _, from what I can tell, seems to be some sort of adjective/attributive suffix. Just using_ mir'osik _to describe a noun instead of as a noun._

 _Chakaar_ — _Insult, similar meaning to "scumbag"_

[ _Kandosa, ken copaani sa-talganr. Ache naar ven parji, juaan ni sa tagar lise ast-kiramur. Jat?_ ] — _Constructed from canon Mandoa, though with a couple invented grammar things and slight changes to reflect Cina's rural accent. Means something like: "Canderous, please don't go starting a fight. At least until after the job is done, then as far as I'm concerned you two can kill each other. Okay?"_

(The rest of the conversation) — _Cand: "Of course, friend (what he calls Cina). I'll be as soft as sponge cake." Cina: "Liar." Cand: "Are you calling me a liar?" Cina: "That's exactly what I said. Is your helmet—"_

 _Aruetii — outsider or enemy (i.e. non-Mandalorian)_

 _Ad'ika — boy, girl, kid (affectionately)_

 _Ret'urche vi_ — _Standard farewell, slight spelling alteration to reflect Cina's accent._

 _Koyachi — Another set phrase, used by Canderous here as a more casual sort of farewell. Canon spelling changed for reasons._

 _Nerds want explanation on Mandoa spelling changes? I can_ _ **so**_ _do that. First of all, the use of "y" in canon Mandoa is very European, with the baggage inherited from the complex linguistic history of the continent. The whole vowel-or-a-consonant thing. I've reanalyzed the "y" as either a vowel (in these contexts changed to "i"), a consonant, or a modifier on an adjacent consonant (i.e. "cy" becomes "ch")._

 _Also, apostrophes. Canon Mandoa puts apostrophes at the intersection of any two morphemes (excluding plurals and certain inflections). I only write them when they're phonologically meaningful. As an example,_ Mandoa _doesn't need one because the language doesn't allow diphthongs, so the vowels would be pronounced distinctly anyway. But in_ mir'osik _, the apostrophe is necessary to mark the syllable break (mir-o-sik, not mi-ro-sik). In cases like_ koyachi _, I disagree with the convention set by the original creator. Commands are formed be sticking "ke-" at the beginning of a verb, the "e" dropping if the vowel starts with a vowel. I thought it made more sense to interpret the "e" as epenthetic, in which case I think it's just kinda silly to have that apostrophe there._

 _Yes, much nerd, I know._

* * *

 _Cina and Bastila are both going to absolutely hate that conversation._

 _Might be a little while until the next chapter comes out. I've been feeling completely horrible lately, which means little ability to do pretty much anything. Seems to be brain-related specifically, so writing in particular is fucked._

 _Whenever I get to it, though, last Taris chapter. Woo._

 _(Because fuck Taris.)_


	10. Taris — V

_Hi._ O_O

 _Notes at the end._

* * *

 _The girl was here again._

 _It would be difficult to miss her. Most Jedi, they stood in the force as sieves in a river, the Force flowing through them with no resistance. Oh, the analogy wasn't perfect — they did carry their power with them, glowing to her senses like an overcharged battery, but the impression she got was one overwhelmingly passive. Jedi, for the most part, were a sort of being fundamentally excised of will, allowing themselves to be touched or to be moved, not through any motivation of their own, but by the nebulous will of the Force._

 _Which was, of course, delusional. It astounded Kreia, still after all these years, how firmly people believed something like the Force was even capable of having a will of its own. They were listening to an echo, searching for meaning outside of themselves, the likelihood that they were hearing their own voices somehow never occurring to them._

 _But young Lesami was different. She was powerful, yes, it would be impossible to not notice. So hot Kreia could feel her from near the opposite end of the library, burning so bright, only a handful of Jedi she'd ever met could compare. She was powerful, but that wasn't what made her different, no. Most Jedi were passive, their presence in the Force smooth, soft. This girl, very distinctive, she was focused, sharp, an intensity about her that was impossible to miss, a low-boiling passion thick through every inch of her soul._

 _She'd been this way when she'd first come to Coruscant — must be five years now, Kreia lost track so easily — and she hadn't changed. Most children, when they came to the Temple their edges were gradually worn away, focus blunted and will softened, until they were as passive and empty as the majority of their Order. Some few exceptions, this girl among them, something in them rejected the influence of their teachings, became only harder, sharpening to a keen intensity none in their presence could ignore. It was an itch on the mind, a tingle on the skin, instinct to_ look _, something here deserved attention._

 _A subtle sense of danger, most would say. She believed it was somewhat more complex than that._

 _Kreia had noticed her, sitting alone in the library, quite often of late. She'd noticed, because Jedi her age only rarely spent this much time reading alone, their attentions were often elsewhere. And on today of all days..._

 _Well. Kreia found herself curious._

 _By the time she was finished typing out her report on the condition of this week's batch of holocrons, the girl was still sitting there. Deciding there was nothing particularly pressing to occupy her time, Kreia crossed the length of the empty library, coming to hover over the girl's shoulder. "I'm surprised to find you here, Apprentice."_

 _Lesami twitched, turning to glance over her shoulder. "Should I not be?"_

" _I'm sure I couldn't say. 'Should' implies obligation, and I am not in a position to be familiar with your obligations. I_ expected _you to be elsewhere — 'should' has nothing to do with it."_

 _For a brief moment, the girl stared up at her, that sharply-honed focus tuned on her with all the intensity of a lightsaber in her face. "You're Kreia, aren't you? The blind Archivist."_

 _Kreia huffed, her shoulders twitching with her breath. Slipping around to sit at the opposite side of the table, she said, "Is that what they call me these days? I can't say I'm surprised that I've been reduced to my profession and my disability, but I would think, with all the effort we put into educating them, Jedi would have more creativity than that."_

 _Her lips twitched, the air singing with her amusement. Painfully precise upper-class Basic twisting with a sarcastic drawl, "They also say you're mad, if that makes you feel better."_

" _I'm not surprised by that either." A thin smile pulling at her lips, Kreia leaned a little over the table. "I've found, especially in our circles, that madness is used less as a descriptor and more a pejorative. People who you do not understand, people who make you think, who make you question the foundations of what you believe you know. People who make you uncomfortable, these people are mad. No, I'm not at all surprised they say I'm mad."_

 _Lesami said nothing for a moment, simply staring back at her, something deep in that brilliant abyss of her mind churning away. "How do you get around, anyway? I've always wondered about that."_

" _Are you saying you couldn't find your way around the Temple with your eyes closed?"_

" _Well, yes, I suppose I could. How do you_ read _, though? I'm sure I couldn't do that."_

 _She smiled. "Oh, it's not complicated, I'm sure you'll figure it out. But I didn't come here to talk about me. Believe me, I've had quite enough of talking about me some decades ago." The lectures she'd gotten back in her twenties were quite simply innumerable — she hadn't dealt with the reality of her rapidly-fading sight well at all, at the time, she'd had a few difficult years. Even now, decades later, she tried to avoid the other Masters whenever possible._

 _More than on her face — fine contours like that were_ very _hard to pick up, Kreia never had gotten the hang of it — she felt Lesami close off, her sense of her almost seeming to contract, focusing inward. "I don't much feel like talking about me either."_

" _That's a curious assumption to make. I am an Archivist. Why should anything but your reading material be any of my concern?"_

" _I honestly have no idea, but the first thing you said to me was that you're surprised to find me here. That implies something else." Lesami paused, just for a second. "Besides, you're not a general Archivist. You manage the restricted holocrons, which I'm not even allowed to touch. I doubt you have any idea what I've been reading."_

 _Kreia shrugged — all of that was correct. "Regardless, you're in my domain right now, Apprentice. You can either submit to my curiosity, or you can get out of my library."_

" _As you say, Master." There was a hint of sarcasm on the title, a tinge of bitterness._

 _She felt herself smiling again. "Correct me if I'm wrong — as much of my days as I spend communing with holocrons, I find I lose track of time quite easily. But I was under the impression there's a Proving today."_

 _Lesami turned somehow sharper, a dark edge threading through her. "I didn't want to participate."_

" _At your age? I find that hard to believe." Lesami twitched, moved to respond, but Kreia cut out ahead of her. "As much as Jedi may think we can strip ourselves of all of our irrational impulses, the drive toward competition is instinctual to most sapient species. Especially among adolescents, it's unavoidable. And that is not the only reason your age is a factor. How many initiates are there left in your peer group?"_

" _Not many." The words were tense, thick, ground out from between clenched teeth._

" _No, I wouldn't imagine there are. An initiate only has so long to attract a master before Reassignment begins to wonder about their future, and most your age have already moved on. The entire purpose of the Provings is to arrange for Jedi to encounter potential padawans. One would think an initiate of your age would be taking every opportunity available to her."_

" _I_ am _taking every opportunity available to me."_

" _I'm afraid I don't see how."_

 _For long moments, Lesami didn't answer. She simply sat there, her breath thick and heavy, tingling waves of irritation cresting against Kreia's face. Finally, she calmed somewhat, her voice consciously flat. "Our instructors have already been trying to brace me for failure. They don't come out and say what they're saying, of course, but they're not as subtle as they think they are. I'm not going to get picked, everyone knows it._

" _The Jedi Archives is the greatest single concentration of knowledge in the entire bloody galaxy. The way I see it, there is no better use for the little time here I have left."_

" _Hmm." Kreia let that hang for a moment, her fingers idly tapping at the table. "Members of the Service Corps are permitted access to our library."_

" _I don't plan on staying. They don't pay as much attention to them as they do proper Jedi. Once I've washed out, I'm going back home."_

" _That's a curious thing to be admitting to a Master of the Order."_

 _Lesami snorted. "Like you care. Besides, it doesn't matter. The second they send me off Coruscant there's nothing the Order can do to stop me from walking away."_

 _The girl wasn't wrong about that — or, at least, mostly. The Jedi did keep watch over their own members, out of a questionable sense of duty to the rest of the galaxy. It was a constant low-level dread among the leaders of their Order, that one of the many beings they'd trained might turn their backs, fall to the Dark, and carve a swath of death and chaos through the galaxy before they could be stopped. It wasn't unheard of for a Jedi to leave, and be allowed to leave, though the Order always kept an eye on them when they did, usually for the rest of their lives, often did their best to get them to change their mind._

 _The more volatile cases, those the Order feared were already too close to the Dark Side, those were captured and brought back to the Temple, where they were essentially imprisoned until the Council felt they were no longer a danger. Some were held for the rest of their natural lives._

 _The Jedi did not have a perfectly clean record when it came to managing their own dissenters._

 _It was true, however, that the Service Corps was watched much less closely. The vast majority of the former initiates there were ones that hadn't the ability to finish their training. There were a few who simply hadn't the temperament, but for the most part they were considered a lesser potential danger. While it was very rare for a Jedi to walk away from the Order proper, the Service Corps bled former initiates at a non-negligible rate._

 _Considering how obviously powerful Lesami was, Kreia was certain she would be more tightly managed than most. But, given her family's influence and her personal inclinations, she didn't doubt Lesami would be gone in a matter of weeks._

 _And that would be quite unfortunate._

" _And why do you think that is?"_

 _There was a short pause, Lesami too disoriented by the subject change to answer immediately. "I... What?"_

" _You are quite certain nobody will want you for a padawan. Why is that?"_

 _The girl's mouth worked in near-silence for a moment. "Ah, well, I'm right, aren't I?"_

" _That's not an answer."_

" _It doesn't matter_ why _. I'm not wrong."_

" _Now, now, Apprentice," Kreia said, her lips tilting into a smirk, "I know you don't believe that."_

 _Kreia couldn't see such things, of course, but she felt rather confident in her assumption that Lesami was rolling her eyes. "I would make a terrible Jedi. Everybody says so. No Knight or Master has even showed the barest hint of interest for very long at all, I've been told multiple times to prepare myself for disappointment. Even the other initiates know I'm not going anywhere."_

" _Why?"_

" _You're going to have to be more specific than that."_

" _Why do you think you'd make a terrible Jedi?"_

" _Well, I..." The girl cut off, a shiver of irritation rippling through her. "Isn't that bloody obvious?"_

" _I don't see that it is."_

" _Do you really think that, or are you messing with me on purpose?"_

" _Are those mutually exclusive?"_

" _You're bloody irritating, you know that?"_

 _Kreia smiled. "You're not the first to say so. I am curious, though. What is it that makes you think you'd make a terrible Jedi?"_

" _Well, I just..." Lesami trailed off, shifting in her seat a little, her mind stuttering. "I'm just, I'm not very much like... Why are you even asking me this anyway, what do you care?"_

" _I'm just curious."_

 _The girl forced out a frustrated scoff. But, after a moment muttering under her breath in a language Kreia didn't recognize, she did answer. "I just can't... I've tried to, to take all this... I don't know what the right word is. It just doesn't...click, for me. All this Jedi stuff. I've tried — believe me, I've tried — but none of it, really, sits right, for me. I can't be what they want me to be, I, I just can't. And I can't fake it well enough to slip by, either._

" _I mean, most of the actual...Force, stuff, that I can do. Some of it was hard at first — my swordsmanship still isn't quite up to par — but almost anything to do with the Force directly comes easy to me, it always has. Shite, I've been using it here and there since I was toddler, it's not difficult. I didn't even have to be_ taught _how to do most sense and control abilities, and the rest is easy too._

" _It's everything else that's the problem. If being a Jedi were just a matter of picking up a bunch of magic powers, there wouldn't even be a question, would there?"_

 _No, there wouldn't. Even Kreia, who had very little contact with the other Masters, and even_ less _with the initiates, knew a fair bit about Lesami Revas. She doubted the girl realized how much she was talked about behind closed doors. There were always the less flattering comments about her temperament and her dedication, of course, but, among her generation, she was almost universally believed to be the single most powerful in the Force._

 _An impression Kreia couldn't disagree with. It could be hard to tell for certain at rest — one's ability to manipulate the Force highly depended on focus and clarity of mind — but even just sitting this close to the girl was...well, interesting. It was a feeling on the air, a sharp yet subtle heat, like a warm mist that set her lungs tingling, energy spreading through her veins with each breath, tickling at her skin. She wasn't the only being Kreia had ever met to have such an effect on her environment, but Lesami certainly was special. Not unique, but precious all the same._

 _Of course, most powerful Jedi lost this...intensity of presence, as they trained. Jedi were bred to be passive, to fold into their environment, until nearly all semblance of individuality, of personality was washed away into the ether. This girl, however, only seemed to be growing more willful._

 _It was...interesting._

" _What does it mean to be a Jedi, then? The part that you feel you're so bad at."_

" _Please don't make me recite the bloody Code again."_

" _Which part do you mean? The Code has been expanded and amended so many times over the millennia, if I were to have you recite the whole thing we might be here for a while. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a compelling use of my time."_

 _She didn't make a sound, but Kreia caught the shiver of amusement echoing across the table._

" _But, why not, let's look at the Code for a moment. You're familiar with the Three Pillars, I'm sure."_

 _Kreia couldn't be sure, but from the way the girl droned, "Yes," she had the feeling Lesami was rolling her eyes. "Self-discipline, Responsibility, and Service."_

" _Yes. You've had the various strictures forced into your head all too well over the years, I'm sure, we needn't get into those details. But, tell me, in your analysis of the governing ethics of our Order, have you noticed any...say, contradictions?"_

 _There was a hard burst of surprise, hitting like a slap to the face. "Well, yes. They're everywhere, if you know how to look."_

" _Like what?"_

 _Lesami let out a sigh, a hand coming up to run through her hair. "Okay, the obvious one that always gets me, the call to Deny Arrogance. People fail that one all the time. For one thing, it's mutually exclusive with the call to Deny Curiosity. That one's usually explained as, don't use the Force to get into people's heads and steal their secrets just because. But, if that's what they'd_ wanted _to say, they could have said something about respecting a being's privacy, or something like that, but that's not what they say. They say,_ Deny Curiosity _. On the surface, it makes sense why they might use those words — curiosity is an emotion of a sort, even a passionate one. There are many people who are driven by curiosity, their desire to learn, to_ know _, directs their entire lives. If we are to reject passion of all sorts, it would make sense to also reject curiosity._

" _But there's an inherent problem with that: in denying curiosity one embraces arrogance. There is an implication that pursuing further understanding of whatever situation you're confronted with is not necessary, that your current understanding of society and how it functions is sufficient. In dictating that Jedi remain passive, not investigate, the Code is implying that a Jedi always knows everything they need to know_ _already_ _. I cannot imagine anything more arrogant than that._

" _And, furthermore, we're told to Honour the Council. The leadership of the Order, they are to be respected and, more to the point, obeyed, at all times, without question. Sure, from the perspective of your average, individual Jedi, this could be considered part of Denying Arrogance. But what about the Masters_ on _the Council? Are_ they _Denying Arrogance? No, this law is essentially claiming that the High Council is_ infallible! _Are those twelve Masters somehow different than the rest of us, somehow enlightened in a way we simple mortals can't comprehend? The very idea is ridiculous! They're just people, like everyone else!_

" _And one of the calls to Service, we are commanded to Defend the Weak. This is at the core of what a Jedi is, you could argue — I've read past Jedi making that very argument over and over, one way or another. But, at the same time, we are told to serve the Republic, and to respect its laws. As though the Republic isn't a fallible institution led by corruptible beings. Okay, I knew these people, growing up — my homeworld's Senator is my...third cousin, or something like that, his daughter and I were often forced together for one reason or another. Oh, not the current Senator, I mean the previous— Whatever, it doesn't matter, I actually know this one too. All the powerful families on Shawken know each other, really, high society works like that on most Republic worlds._

 _"Anyway, I'm not saying there aren't_ any _good people at the top. There_ are _, there's a long tradition of selfless public service in the Republic. But most of them? The Senate is filled with self-interested cronies and corporate sycophants, a corrupt, incestuous cesspool of the wealthy and the privileged, the vast majority care_ nothing _for the common people. Oh, they toss out enough scraps to keep the machine running, to make sure the plebs are content to remain in their place, but beyond that? No, so long as their own power and their own wealth is maintained, the ruling elite of the Republic, the people who make the actual decisions as to how this galaxy is run, they don't care, they don't care about the common citizenry, not even a little bit. That they_ should _hardly even occurs to them._

" _Serving the Republic, Honouring its Laws, these are directly opposed to our call to Defend the Weak. It's also arrogant, when you think about it..."_

 _Well, that was a rather longer, more impassioned rant than Kreia had expected. Lesami's voice had gotten rather heated by the end — Kreia recognized the way she pulled away as a breathing exercise, the girl belatedly trying to calm herself. Surprising, that she had gotten carried away like that, few initiates could stay here for more than a year or two without having greater self-control imposed on them._

 _She knew any other Master would chastise the girl for that display. But Kreia felt herself smiling, her throat tight with ecstatic laughter she forced herself to hold. The girl's righteous frustration had had her burning even brighter, with an intensity that was almost deafening, but that wasn't it, not really. It was something at once far simper and far more significant._

 _Lesami_ cared _. How long had it been, since Kreia had spoken with any Jedi who_ actually cared? _About anything, really — Jedi were told_ not _to care, that to have any investment in nearly anything at all was an early step on the path to the Dark Side. It made them empty, soulless things, they might as well be droids. It was the issue at the heart of the very faults Lesami had just pointed out. After all, if one didn't_ care _, it was easy to pass off the injustices of the Republic, the hypocrisies and failures of the Order. If one didn't care, it didn't matter, nothing truly mattered._

 _It was an empty life, to be a Jedi, almost pathologically nihilist in the denial of any purpose, any meaning. Honestly, she even had trouble understanding it sometimes._

 _Finding a Jedi, even one still only an initiate, who still_ cared _, who refused to let herself be made empty... Well, it was refreshing. She'd thought the Order had changed, over these last few decades, that Jedi like herself were increasingly a thing of the past. It was something of a relief, to see the new generation hadn't been entirely brainwashed. Even if it were just a handful, that was still something._

" _I assume you are familiar with the works of Entari Suvash." The girl was Shawkenese, after all, and well-educated, she'd certainly at least heard the name before._

 _Lesami twitched. "Ah, yes. And,_ kun si _, by the way, Entari kun si Suvasha. If you use both names, you have to say the whole thing. And you have to put the name of the House in the attributive, when speaking of a person. It's, er, Late Alsakani. It's sounds weird if you don't include it."_

 _Perhaps to a native of Shawken — Kreia honestly had trouble keeping straight if she were supposed to be using_ si _, or_ lai _, or however many possibilities there were, she didn't actually know. For that matter, she'd been under the impression only the ancient, vestigial nobility on a tiny handful of worlds still observed the 'proper' form anyway. But that didn't really matter right now. "Have you read_ The Hubris of Dogma _?"_

" _No."_

 _Her lips pulling into a smile, Kreia said, "Perhaps you should. It might lend a certain understanding of why I believe you will be, in fact, the_ exact _sort of Jedi we need. I, for one, will be quite glad to have you. Unless you have any objection, I shall arrange to say as much to the Council as soon as possible."_

 _It took a handful of seconds for the girl to put together exactly what Kreia meant by that. Not too surprising — Lesami had, after all, been quite thoroughly convinced no Master would ever take her._

 _But then, Kreia was hardly an ordinary Jedi Master._

* * *

"I still think this is a terrible idea."

Cina shot the irritating Jedi a look. She choked back the first rude response that came to mind, then the second, and ultimately ended up not saying anything at all.

They were holed up in one of the kids' hideouts, watching the bank of display screens plastering the walls in a corner of the room. (Mission and Zaalbar really had managed to salvage or steal an impressive wealth of equipment.) A few of them were filled with lines of code, scrolling by far quicker than Cina could read, most of the rest false-colour video feeds, piped in from cameras in the upper city maintained by local law enforcement, a system Mission had apparently cracked when her age had still been in the single digits. One in the middle was in natural colour — but low resolution and distorted, the disorienting, twisted view from a fisheye lens — the feed from a hidden camera Kandosa was wearing, transmitted back to them through his com. Kandosa was approaching the Sith military building even now, the security officers at the towering durasteel entrance hardly even giving him a second look.

While Cina had some incentive to not antagonise Shan more than she had to, Mission didn't have the same inhibition. "Well," she said, her voice sliding into a venomous drawl, "I guess it's lucky you're not the one calling the shots, ain't it?"

Cina sighed. "Could we maybe not get into an argument in the middle of an op?"

"Hey, I'm not the one coming off like—"

Kandosa's voice, hissing slightly with artifacts from Mission's encryption, cut in. " _Ad'ika_ , I'd sooner have you watching the skies for me. We can argue with the Jedi later."

"Yeah, fine, whatever." She said it in a low, mutinous groan, but Mission focused on the flood of data flicking past just the same.

With another glance at Shan, Cina nodded to herself. Kandosa, Mission, and Asyr had everything handled — this was as good a time as any. "Okay, I have to take care of something else. Mission, tell Asyr she's up. Shan," she said, nodding toward the opposite end of the single-room flat, "can I have a minute?"

A reluctant sort of grimace crossed Shan's face, but she nodded. Casting a last furtive, disapproving glance over the bank of displays, she turned smartly around on her heel and stalked away. Trailing behind her, Cina was brought up short when Shan abruptly spun back around. Nearly ran into her, probably would have knocked her right over — there was something stiff and brittle about the Jedi's posture, clearly anxious about something. "If this is to be another smug lecture, I can tell you now I am not in the mood."

Cina couldn't help a little smirk. "That's my line."

That was _almost_ real heat on that glare — odd, she'd been under the impression Jedi weren't permitted anger. _There is no emotion_ , and all that.

"Anyway, no, this isn't another _lecture_. We need to talk about something else."

"Whatever it is, I'm sure it can wait for a moment less—"

"I know what the Order did to my mind."

 _That_ shut the Jedi up. Shan cut off instantly, her mouth frozen in mid-syllable. Held preternaturally still, she didn't even seem to be breathing, the little colour she did have in her face slowly draining away.

At least she was taking this bloody seriously. That was almost gratifying, to be honest, even Carth had ceased treating this...issue of hers as the existential crisis it was. (Granted, she tried to ignore it most of the time herself, not the point.) "I know I'm not Cianen Hayal, she probably never existed. I've figured out I was a Jedi. And I'm pretty sure you know _exactly_ who I used to be."

A crack shot through Shan's statuesque stillness, a narrow frown creasing her brow. She twitched, her mouth working silently for a second, finally finding her voice. "You don't..." She cleared her throat. "How much do you remember?"

Cina shrugged. "Virtually nothing. I know I was born to a wealthy Shawkenese family. I vaguely remember causing a stir one vacation, accidentally threw my cousin across the room. I was...eight or nine at the time, something like that. I have the _feeling_ I didn't stay very long after that, I was sent away to the Jedi around then, but I don't remember anything about any of it. It's mostly just...impressions, feelings. I don't even know my own name. _You_ know, though, I'm certain you do."

"There's no way you could possibly know that for certain."

Withholding the urge to roll her eyes, she said, "You're not nearly as subtle as you think you are, _Master Jedi_. I can tell when someone's afraid of me."

Shan winced, eyes turning from Cina's. She was still another moment, brow heavy, face faintly twitching with some internal argument. "I cannot give you the answers you seek." Cina opened her mouth to argue, but before she could get anything out Shan raised her voice a little, cutting over her. "I _cannot_. The Masters of the Council on Dantooine have sworn me to secrecy on certain matters. There are things I cannot tell you without their permission."

It took some effort to keep her reaction off her face, enough she probably failed. The Jedi impulse toward secrecy was one anyone who paid attention to galactic affairs at all was well familiar with — having it directed at something that affected her so intimately was... Well, 'irritating' fell short. "That's a crock of shite if I ever heard one."

"I'm not—"

"Oh, I believe you. I just think it's fucking idiotic." Cina pushed out a long sigh, trying to force out as much of the frustration tightening her throat as she could. It didn't work very well, but her voice came out level, at least. "I don't suppose there's anything you _can_ tell me. For starters, what the fuck are the Jedi doing mucking about with their own people's heads? That's a bit much even for them."

Shan hesitated a long moment, eyes bouncing between Cina and the wall at her side. "It's something of an...experiment."

"An _experiment?_ Oh, you _better_ be bloody joking, because if the Jedi rewrote my entire personality as a fucking _experiment..._ "

"Do let me finish. Not _that_ kind of experiment." Her eyes falling closed, Shan paused another few seconds, clearly picking over her words. Cina bit her lip to stop herself from saying anything, trying to force back the fury clawing at her chest.

(It was _sort_ of working — she hadn't punched Shan in the face yet, she thought she was demonstrating an impressive degree of self-control here.)

"It is a common belief among the Jedi," Shan started, slowly, cautiously, her eyes still shut, "that once a person has touched the Dark Side there is no turning back from it. That it... It's a corruptive influence, that once one has surrendered to it it will haunt them forever. Over the millennia, there have been dozens of attempts to redeem fallen Jedi, most of which ended in tragic failure. Even the best cases were...mixed.

"You presented a unique opportunity." Shan took a long, slow breath, shivering a little through the exhale. "You _were_ a Jedi, once. But, years ago now, you left the Order, and ultimately joined the Sith."

Cina felt a single eyebrow start wandering up her forehead.

"During a battle against Republic forces, you were injured, by friendly fire. Severely injured. You were taken into Jedi custody, but it was...undetermined, whether you would ever wake up. There was some significant brain damage, we... The Council elected to... Who you had been was lost anyway, it was believed. Perhaps, if a new identity was constructed from scratch, and implanted into your ruined mind, you would wake up, you would have a second chance. And it worked, obviously."

Pretty story, that. Too bad Shan was lying.

Well, to be entirely fair to the prissy chit, it was _possible_ she was telling what she believed to be the truth — or at least a heavily redacted version of the truth, with the classified bits edited out. Cina couldn't tell one way or the other. It was very clear Shan was dissembling, she was having trouble even getting a full sentence out, but that _could_ be because she was simply trying to explain as much as she could without permission from her damn Council. It was theoretically _possible_ Shan was being as honest as she could possibly be in the situation.

Personally, Cina doubted it, but she would have to work with this woman, at least through the next few days. She was willing to give her as much of the benefit of the doubt as she reasonably could for the time being.

But the story was, quite simply, nonsense. That wasn't how brain damage worked. If a person was brain dead, _they were brain dead_ — the Force might be magic, but she was _pretty sure_ circumventing catastrophic, irreversible neural death by, just...rearranging them, no, that wasn't a thing. Even as far as medical developments in other fields had gotten in recent centuries, playing with a being's brain was still a very complicated proposition. Peripheral neural regeneration was a problem that had been solved millennia ago — pre-spaceflight, in fact — but the structure of the central nervous system was just too finely detailed to reproduce effectively.

Any attempt was as likely to result in an irreversible coma as just leaving the person alone. Best case scenario, the subject _would_ wake up, but would have been made _completely insane_. And even pulling it off _that_ well would be a bloody miracle.

Perhaps the Jedi could lean on the Force to cheat, but Cina thought that was giving them a _bit_ too much credit. Jedi were magic, not gods.

Not to mention, there were quite obvious holes in the story. If she'd had brain damage severe enough who she'd been was completely irrecoverable, why did she suddenly remember that time she'd magically thrown Desa across the library? Okay, fine, she'd be willing to allow the possibility of an explicit memory here or there surviving, but there was something far more damning: her _implicit_ memory.

Most people who hadn't studied the subject made the mistake of assuming all memory was, just, recollection of events in a person's own life, but it was far more complex than that. A person's skills, knowledge or processes they'd practised to proficiency, those were encoded in the brain in virtually the same way experiential memories were. If brain damage is severe enough to significantly disrupt a person's memory of their own life, it _also_ hits their implicit memory. Patients forget individual words or even entire languages, how to use the most basic technology, even things like how to walk or dress themselves. Rehabilitation from severe head injuries focuses on relearning whatever fundamental life skills have been lost, that's why they usually have such long recovery windows.

But, as far as she could tell, her implicit memory was _still intact_. The languages she'd never studied, how to use a blaster, history and xenosociology she couldn't remember learning, her unsettling knowledge of organised crime. Granted, she often didn't know she knew these things, but that wasn't counter-evidence. In fact, she felt it might be _proof_ the story was false — there was no reason for Cianen Hayal to know these things, so she didn't know she knew them; but, once some external prompting cued this hidden knowledge, it was recovered in its entirety. That meant the knowledge was _still there_ , the ability to access it was simply repressed.

That implied her old neural structure — which, fundamentally, _was_ the person she'd once been — _was still there_.

If she'd still needed _more_ proof, there were the...un-Cianen feelings and opinions she had sometimes. There was this little thing called neuroplasticity — the critical consequence of the concept was that a person's brain, at a physical, microscopic level, was gradually shaped by their experiences. A person's cognitive biases and emotional prejudices were hardwired, increasingly as they were relied upon. It wasn't a matter of choice, or self-control, or whatever, one's personality was physically determined by the structure of their brain, which was itself shaped by the experiences that personality led to, in a self-reinforcing cycle that couldn't truly be escaped.

If she _had_ had such catastrophic brain damage, if _everything_ she'd been had been destroyed, that underlying structure would have been destroyed too, everything would have had to have been rebuilt from the ground up. But, she had feelings that didn't match Cianen Hayal's experiences. The intense, near overwhelming hatred for slavery. The...she didn't know what to call it, the peculiar combination of depression and affection Mission's eccentric, sunny cheerfulness often struck her with. That depression itself, a mind-numbing despair that crept up on her when she least expected it, in those quiet moments she had too much time to think. Her disdain for the Republic and the Jedi — sure, Cianen had always been rather political, but something about it was just... _wrong_ , it felt too... It was almost personal, in a way, less a removed frustration with their shortcomings and their corruption, as she should expect, and more an immediate sense of...of disillusionment, of _betrayal_...

She took herself aback, sometimes, with the strength of feelings she didn't expect to have. It was rather disorienting.

(Though, her opinions on the Republic and the Jedi suddenly made a _lot_ of sense. A certain famous Jedi had been Shawkenese nobility, and they were about the same age — it was quite possible she and Revan had known each other as children, and even _more_ likely their time at the Temple mostly overlapped. Cina would bet her mysterious fortune that she'd been one of the original Revanchists. That bitterness made perfect sense in context.)

Not to mention, she didn't at all _act_ like Cianen Hayal, what she remembered of herself. For all that she did have a bit of a mouth about her — she was somewhat infamous among the grad students attached to her department for her acerbic, sarcastic lectures — she'd always been rather passive when it came to actually _doing_ things. She meant, yes, other people's idiocy would often annoy her, and she wasn't shy about saying so, but it never really occurred to her to take the initiative to remedy their stupid mistakes. She'd never had much interest in doing anything more than puttering about campus, researching and writing and torturing poor, defenceless undergrads. But...

Well, just look at everything she'd done since arriving on Taris. Shan had clearly been horrified Cina had taken charge of their little band of misfits — probably worried she was slowly reverting to her old self, come to think of it. Because it was _very much_ out of character for Cianen, looking back part of her was shocked she'd had the stones to pull off half the shite she'd done. But at the time, it'd...

Dragging Carth around by the nose, charging straight into blasterfire like a crazy person, picking up local strays, plotting to spark a gang war or break a blockade, barking out orders in the middle of a battle even as she formulated alterations to the strategy on the fly, it all... It, it felt _natural_ , like...like she'd been doing this forever, this sort of insanity was just _what she did_.

The person she'd once been was _still in here_. She'd just been suffocated under Cianen Hayal, a false personality imposed on her against her will.

By the Jedi.

The Jedi had suppressed everything she had been and replaced it with an identity that suited their needs.

 _Knowingly_.

There was no other explanation. The Jedi had to know neurology better than she did — they did like to claim they were primarily scholars, after all, and it wasn't exactly a subject she'd studied very thoroughly. (She didn't think she had, anyway.) And they had an advantage, they could _read minds_ , they would be able to _confirm for a fact_ there was still someone in here.

Yet they'd forced Cianen Hayal on her anyway.

Those long interviews on Coruscant hadn't been to vet her for an archaeological project they were overseeing. No, they'd been confirming their brainwashing had stuck.

That was assuming there even _was_ an archaeological project they wanted her for — she'd noticed way back on the _Spire_ , before she'd even begun to suspect her own memories were fictional, that there were massive holes in the logic of their story. Chances were that had been a front to deflect her suspicions.

Dantooine, Shan had said it was the Council _on Dantooine_ that had sworn her to secrecy. It'd happened there, she knew it — fuck, it was all too likely certain Jedi on the Council were the _very same people_ who had mind-raped the person she'd once been into oblivion!

Whatever they wanted her for, whatever plans they'd had in mind when they'd attempted to brainwash her, it was to start on Dantooine.

 _That's_ why they wanted her on Dantooine. _That's_ why they'd wanted a sizable Jedi escort to get her there — Shan was terrified of her, Cina must have been quite impressive in her time. _That's_ why Shan was still insisting, despite how completely insane everything had gotten, that they head straight there once they were offworld.

The Jedi altered her with a purpose. And whatever it was, it would start on Dantooine.

"Hayal? Are you..."

Cina blinked, focused on Shan again. Shan looked...not scared, no, that word was a little too strong. Wary? Staring at Cina, a shade of anxiety behind her eyes, as though waiting for Cina to explode on her, waiting for...well, something to happen. Cina must have gone a bit blank for a moment, too focused on her own thoughts to pay proper attention to the outside world.

Or, perhaps, Shan was using that Jedi mind-reading of hers, and knew exactly what Cina was thinking. Though, if she were, she'd think Shan should look rather more worried than she did. She was still processing the revelation she'd just gotten, but once the shock wore off, well...

She _did_ need to go to Dantooine. But not for the same reasons _Shan_ needed her to. After all, the Jedi might not be _explicitly_ threatening her, but it would be wise to figure out what they wanted at the very least.

Cina had the very clear feeling that trusting the Jedi ever again would be complete lunacy.

"I'm fine. I just..." Cina trailed off, mulled over what exactly she should say for a moment. Jedi did have that mind-reading thing of theirs, but even when they weren't messing with people's heads actively, it was widely believed that they could evaluate a person's sincerity passively. (That was just folklore, but it didn't _feel_ wrong, which meant her unconscious Jedi instincts were probably on board with that one.) So, it would be a bad idea to _lie_ , but... "It's... This is a lot to take in, all at once. I just need a few moments to process it, is all."

Shan's face softened, any obvious trace of suspicion draining away. "I understand. I shall leave you to your thoughts, if that's what you wish." With a hint of disdain, "I should check back in, make sure everything is going according to plan."

Cina nodded. "If Kandosa gets made, call me over. I have a couple contingencies."

"I will." Shan said it rather reluctantly — again, it was quite obvious any sign of Cina's previous personality resurfacing made her _extremely_ uneasy. But at least she seemed to understand she needed Cina for the moment. That was something. As the Jedi glided her way back across the room, Cina stared at her back, brow twitching with a half-hidden frown.

Honestly, she hadn't thought that conversation would make everything _more_ complicated. She couldn't catch a fucking break these days.

* * *

"Status."

The synthesized voice sent a chill running up Saul's spine, his posture unconsciously stiffening, enough that one spot above his hip twinged. Automatically, he slid into the mental exercise he'd been taught long ago — thoughts sharpened on a razor focus, no tangents allowed, no extraneous observations or even feeling at all, giving nothing away. He turned away from the curve of the Taris skyline over his head, heels of his boots clicking together, precise and formal. "There are no further updates, my lord. We have heard whisperings that Shan may have been spotted deep in the lower city, but there's been no independent confirmation yet, and we have no leads on her whereabouts."

Alek didn't respond at first, hardly even seemed to blink. Which was, as usual, subtly unnerving. Alek had always been an imposing man, tall and broad-shouldered, rather more bulky than the average Jedi, his focus on the more athletic side of their Order's skills obvious in limbs and chest. He'd only gotten more intimidating over the years, skin turning a sickly white, hairless pate set to an almost eerie glow under the stark white lights of the bridge, the harsh metal that had replaced his jaw cold and gleaming. Just, standing there, staring, still and imposing.

Saul tried not to think about the times he'd seen Alek kill people with a wave of his hand. Letting one's thoughts wander around the more unstable Jedi was generally inadvisable.

Finally, he spoke. It was always vaguely unsettling, his false voice requiring no movement from his half-ruined face, like a statue inexplicably talking at him. "Is that all you have to report?" It could be hard to tell, the synthesizer not quite up to properly emulating human expression, but Saul thought he _might_ have heard a suggestive note.

Trying to ignore his throat slowly going dry, he said, shaking his head slightly, "No, my lord, nothing relevant occurs to me."

"Nothing. Relevant." The movement slow, with conscious weight to it — Alek always had been a melodramatic bastard, hadn't he — he reached into a pocket in those absurdly overdone black and red Sith robes of his, pulled out a datapad. Proffering it, in a low, flat whisper, "Does this seem relevant to you?"

A single glance at the image on-screen and Saul's heart quite nearly jumped out of his chest. _Lesami_. Looking absurdly like a down-on-her-luck spacer, in worn clothes of cheap synthetic fabrics, hardly even looked like her, save for the way she held herself, sauntering through the bank like she owned the place. Not just _a_ image of Lesami, but _the_ image, the same one Saul had seen before, the one Kanyr had showed him, the angle was the same and—

With a sudden, sharp pain at his temple, the train of thought cut off, Saul wincing before he could stop himself. And Alek was still staring at him, he'd hardly seemed to blink. A sense of dread sinking into his stomach, Saul realized what had just happened.

 _He knows_.

"Sergeant." One of the troopers at Alek's back snapped to attention. "Bring Major Kanyr Sheq to me."

Before Saul could think of a thing to say, the small squad had already left, stomping out of the bridge. He turned back to Alek, internally girding himself. "My lord, if anyone is to be punished for this, it is me. Major Sheq simply did as I ordered her to, there is no reason to—"

"I assure you, Admiral, her fate will be left entirely up to you."

Something about the way the Sith Lord said it struck him with a shiver of unease.

"Notify the fleet to prepare firing solutions."

Saul blinked. "Of course, my lord. The target?"

"Taris."

On instinct, following the rhythm of the conversation, Saul's mouth had already been open when the implication hit. It dropped silently closed again.

He couldn't have heard that right. Saying simply Taris, instead of _on_ Taris, implied he meant to conduct an indiscriminate orbital bombardment. But, but there was no _reason_ to do that! Passing over the horrifying scale of the atrocity he was suggesting they commit — _tens of billions_ of people lived down there — the locals had been nothing but accommodating since they'd arrived. The gangs that plagued the lower city had been a nuisance, of course, but the legitimate government had done everything requested of them to the best of their abilities. This wasn't an occupied Republic world, Taris was a _full voting member_ of the Empire, they couldn't—

"Your Excellency, I beg you to reconsider." It made him feel a little ill using that address — Alek might have forced himself into Lesami's place, but the title had to be confirmed by a full vote of the Assembly, he hadn't bothered — but he did it anyway, hoping it might make Alek more likely to listen. "Neither the planetary administration nor the people of Taris have done anything to provoke such an extreme response."

"Their actions are irrelevant. They _cannot_ escape, either of them. I will have the entire city and everyone in it burned to ash before I risk those two be set loose into the galaxy once again."

"Consider the consequences, Your Excellency, the precedent. Taris is an Imperial world, a full member with a voting delegation to the Assembly. If we do this to one of our own—"

"—the rest will get the message, I'm sure."

Saul's mouth worked in silence for the moment, struck numb by idiotic short-sightedness. "Your Excellency, I—"

"Do you intend to fool me, calling me that?" Alek's eyes had turned sharper, more dangerous, hot with a threat of violence that had Saul choking on his own words. "I'm not so simple as you believe me to be, Admiral. You may be looking at me as you say those words, but it is _her_ I see in your heart."

There was nothing Saul could say to that. It was true: he wasn't Alek's man, never had been. So long as his mind was his own he never would be.

"We'll have to see about that, won't we?"

Despite the potentially mortal danger he knew he was in, Saul felt his own eyes narrow into a glare. "Stop reading my mind."

His face softening slightly, as though with amusement, Alek said, "Prove I can trust you, and maybe I will." Saul didn't like the way he said _that_ much either.

He wouldn't be able to convince Alek to spare Taris, he knew that much already — in any other situation, Alek _might_ listen to reason, but with Lesami down there, no, Alek _couldn't_ let her get away, there was nothing he could do. But, maybe... "Give me a day, my lord. We have thousands of men on the surface, many assigned to this very ship. We need time to recall them."

"No."

"The hit to morale alone would—"

"I want this pathetic excuse for a planet wiped off the face of the galaxy, Admiral. I will accept no delays or half-measures. If you refuse to cooperate, I'll be forced to find someone who will. But—" Just then the squad from before returned, stepping through the doors into the bridge, Kanyr bracketed in the middle, looking rather nervous (as she should). "—perhaps I can be convinced to permit a delay of an hour."

"That is not nearly enough time, my lord. At least twelve hours would—"

" _One_. Hour. Admiral." Alek's eyes burned, almost seeming to glow with a harsh internal light, stealing Saul's words from his tongue. "And I require something in return."

The squad approached, Kanyr was forced to her knees at Alek's feet. He spared her a quick glance, one side of his hairless brow twitching with restrained rage. He held one hand out to the sergeant; the man wordlessly drew his sidearm, handed over the blaster.

Alek, just as silently, offered it to Saul in turn.

* * *

Everything ended up going to shite pretty much instantly. Though, that wasn't entirely unexpected — Cina had made sure they were all well armed for a reason.

Davik Kang had put himself up in a luxury apartment building not far from the capitol district. They'd been apartments once, in any case, but he'd since transformed the top twenty levels or so into his own personal palace. Supposedly, the place had all kinds of over-the-top defenses, from energy shields to surface-to-air weaponry.

At least they didn't have to worry about the approach: Kandosa got on the com to announce he was coming in with some friends, they made it to the fifth floor landing pad without issues. The security staff gave them a few weird looks at the size of their group, enough they'd had to come in on three separate aircraft.

(It wasn't nearly as comfortable of a ride as the proper airspeeder, but she'd decided to cling on behind Asyr on the bike anyway — she _really_ didn't want to be cooped up with Shan in an enclosed space if she could avoid it. Mission had flown with Kandosa, probably for the same reason.)

They didn't even make it all the way through security before the subtle option went up in flames. Most of their little party had been processed — the grunts had tried to insist they hand over their weapons, a glare from Kandosa put a stop to that — but it hung up when they got to Mission. These blokes obviously knew a slicer when they saw one, and they wanted her to hand over all her equipment before letting her inside. That didn't go over well.

One of the thugs started reaching to restrain her, but his hands had barely made it halfway when Kandosa, smoothly and without a blink, put a shot in his back. In a handful of seconds, Cina, Kandosa, and Carth had taken out all the guards, Asyr and Shan stunning the handful of techs, most down before they'd even fired off a shot. Luckily, the blast doors hadn't been slammed shut on them — Shan had put the bloke in the sealed-off control room to sleep somehow, Cina had seen him drop unconscious under the window.

Swapping out the power cell in his rifle, with the sort of absent ease only acquired through endless repetition, Kandosa sneered down at one of the steaming corpses. "Consider this my resignation."

Cina's hand snapped up over her mouth, smothering her laughter a second too late.

Though, that scandalised disapproval on Shan's face was sort of hilarious, maybe she shouldn't have bothered.

The halls just inside were empty, and unexpectedly ascetic, plain tannish metal — she'd never met him, but by what she'd heard Cina had pegged Kang as the hedonistic type. Kandosa had explained this level was mostly intended for certain favored underlings, the top four levels would be far more in line with her expectations, reserved for Kang and his... Well, his "women" was how Kandosa had put it, but Cina would bet "slaves" was a more accurate word.

For a mad few seconds, as they stormed down the halls, Cina almost insisted they rescue them all. But they didn't have the time to track them down, Kang could call in reinforcements or just fly off on the very ship they were trying to steal. So she swallowed back her rage, trying to ignore how much it tasted like self-hatred.

After a few turns through the plain halls, they peeled back into an open atrium of some kind, occupied with a few chairs here and there, an occasional low planter, a bank of lifts set into the far wall. And, of course, a couple dozen Exchange thugs. "Shan, cover Mission." The first volley dropped several of them, but the air was soon alight with screaming plasma, sending everyone diving for cover.

This fight didn't end up lasting very long either. Apparently, the first batch at the door hadn't had enough time to raise the alarm, they'd managed to get the drop on them. Not to mention this particular group seemed a little green: they were almost visibly panicky, their aim a little too wide for professionals. Careful shots around sparking benches and melting chairs, it only took two minutes or so before they were all dead.

Cina could have done without the concussion grenade Kandosa had tossed into the middle of the pack, though — just the noise of the blasters was bad enough, setting _that_ off indoors gave her a bloody horrendous headache. He just grinned back at her chastising glare.

That man _did_ like explosions.

At some point during their staring contest, Mission had ended up at the control panel for the lifts. "Shit, they locked them down." The girl's hands were a little shaky, poking around, but she was holding together, at least. "I could maybe crack it, but I'd need to reroute—"

"Where's the lock?"

Mission jumped, blinked up at her for a second. "Ah...this model?" She stared at the door of the nearest lift, running a hand over the ceramic surface, gave it a hard tap in the middle. "Right here. It's a maglock, but it'll have a deadswitch, we'll have to—"

Rotating her rifle out of the way, Cina tugged open the long pouch belted into her waist. She pulled out the dead Jedi's lightsaber, the blue blade snapping into life with the softest touch of her thumb, the air heavy with a deep hum as she rotated the hilt around in her hand with a flourish. Bracing the pommel against her other hand, she drove the tip into the center of the door, burning easily through the weak point at the seam. Sparks flung from the glowing, superheated metal pinching at her skin, she dragged the blade a few inches down, then a bit further up, the blade catching here and there as it met the inner workings of the lock. Finally she felt it give way, shut the lightsaber off and returned it to its pouch. It took a moment to wedge her fingers into the seam, but once she had a good grip the doors opened easily, exposing the smooth, dark, empty depths of the lift shaft. "We climb. Top floor."

"Ah," Mission started, shaky with nerves, "I don't know about you guys, but I don't think I can..."

"Zaalbar."

"What do you— Oh, okay, good idea." The two of them appeared at Cina's shoulder a moment later, Mission clinging to Zaalbar's back, small enough she was almost entirely hidden in his shaggy fur. Zaalbar leapt into the shaft to meet the wall at the opposite side, claws throwing sparks for a second before they caught. He soon climbed out of sight, scaling the smooth metal with unnerving ease.

"Damn. Remind me to not piss him off." Asyr, who'd stepped up to her side at some point, nodded into the shaft. "You'll need to cut it open at the top too. There should be a ladder next to the door."

"Right." That was going to be a bloody pain — there wasn't really enough of a ledge on the other side of these doors to stand on. Not to mention there'd probably be more people with guns up there, just waiting to shoot her the instant she had the doors open. Oh well, figure that out when she got there. Fingers hooked around the frame, she leaned out into the shaft, very consciously not looking down. There was a ladder, right next to the doors on the left, close enough it was an easy step out onto the rungs.

Cina had barely climbed five feet when she heard the last person she wanted to deal with right now calling up from just beneath her, voice gone a little snappish. "You didn't tell me you had a lightsaber."

"I didn't see how it was your business."

Shan let out a huff, low enough Cina might not have heard it without the lift shaft carrying it up to her. "I am not experienced in the use of blasters. I would be far more useful in this endeavor with a familiar weapon in hand."

"That sounds like your problem." Honestly, with surprise on their side, they had more than enough firepower to deal with these morons. They didn't need the extra advantage.

"It is quite unreasonable to allow your personal dislike of me to interfere with—"

"Annas put it in my hand, Shan, told me to keep it with her dying breath. It's mine. Piss off."

That, at least, got Shan to shut the hell up. Too bad it'd probably only work this once.

(" _Go back_ ," Annas had said, " _you must, everything, everything dep—"_ Go back where? Everything depends on what?)

The rest of the climb passed in a strange combination of silence and echoing noise. Security having managed to react in time to get a lockdown in place, the inner workings of the lift had gone completely inert, the subtle hums and sharp clicking one would expect entirely absent. (Not that Cina had realised she knew what the inside of a lift shaft should sound like.) But the walls were solid enough, the double-wide shaft tall enough, every little noise bounced around, lingering far longer in the air than they should. The pattering of their feet and hands on the rungs, the clinking of blasters and packs against their belts, the thin passing of their breath, they all felt somehow larger, amplified, heard once before returning a couple seconds later, thinner and softer, the sounds thick around her pressing inward, her skin tingling with in inexplicable sense of unease, her stomach rising into her throat.

And Zaalbar's claws screeching against the metal of the shaft, echoing back and forth over and over, and over and over and _over_ , was really starting to give her a headache. A headache focused toward the left side of her head, just over her ear, dull and hot.

"— _stand listening to that noise. It's bloody painful."_

" _This isn't the best I've heard, but it's not bad. Just not comfortable to human ears — I can transform it down a bit if you want to hear what it sounds like to us."_

" _I think I'll take a pass on that, thanks. Even while it's drilling holes in my skull, I can still tell I'd find it repetitive and boring."_

" _This coming from the woman who listens to terrible synth dance music from the grimmiest corners of Hutt space."_

" _Hey, there are all kinds of things in Hutt space that are just fascinating, xenosocio—"_

"Hayal? Hayal, what's wrong?"

The memory faded away, the lift shaft around her slipping fitfully back into place. Cina had barely managed to cling to the ladder while her head had been drifting, her hands all too loose and shaky, her knees just steady enough to hold her weight. She leaned forward a bit, bringing her forehead to rest against one of the rungs, the cool metal sharp against the muggy heat clinging to her skin. Actually, she was sweating rather a lot all of a sudden, but not from exertion — she hadn't really thought of it before, but she was _far_ more fit than Cianen Hayal should be. No, this was something else, a heat flushed through her, sickening and unsettling, her stomach roiling up her throat, her fingers twitching, skin writhing. She took a few long, unsteady breaths, trying to force back the remains of the odd episode that had almost just gotten her killed.

She remembered another name, from her past. Not her own, of course, but another Jedi she'd known from her youth, a Verpine named Ac̳ika. Cianen had even heard of Ac̳ika, he'd been one of the original Revanchists. (Well, he or she, Verpine were a single-sex species, they weren't usually particular about the pronouns people used to refer to them in Basic.) She knew — vaguely, like something she'd read once long ago — that she'd learned Ac̳ika's native language (so well as humans could pronounce it) when they'd still been rather young, one of her earlier adventures in learning exotic tongues. So, of course, she'd become one of his favourite people to talk to, since she was essentially the only one among their age group who could even pronounce his name (mostly) correctly, could actually hold a conversation without the need of translation tech, Verpine being physically incapable of speaking Basic and most others unwilling to put in the effort to understand them.

They'd apparently had innumerable inane arguments about all kinds of insignificant things on their downtime, during the war with the Mandalorians. Not malicious arguments, no, just...friends bickering.

He'd been one of the original Revanchists to die in the war, she knew.

Cina could _barely_ even remember Ac̳ika, but the thought still had that dreadful black pit opening up beneath her again, a seductive whisper at the back of her thoughts enticing her to just...

A short moment of concentration, focusing only on the passing of air in and out of her lungs, again, again, and the feverish sickness slowly loosened its hold on her, that inexplicable well of despair following her around pushed back for now. Finally in control of herself again, Cina muttered, "Sorry." Her echoing voice sounded thin, scratchy. "Brain moment." Thankfully, nobody seemed to feel the need to comment on that. She started climbing again, the first few rungs coming awkwardly, precariously teetering, but the repetitive moments gradually smoothed out, and she was (mostly) fine again.

She very studiously ignored best she could the screeching echoes battering her head.

In time they came to the top of the shaft, Cina placing herself just next to the sealed door. And she frowned, biting at the curses on her tongue — the lip on this side of the door was _far_ too narrow, just a couple millimeters, she couldn't possibly stand on that to cut the blasted thing open. They could maybe rig up a harness with a little effort, between herself and Kandosa she was sure they had the necessary supplies, but it would take a bit of finagling, they didn't have that much time. Maybe she could just cut straight through— No, she could pass the lightsaber to Zaalbar, and _he_ could carve through the wall, since he could manage a much firmer hold than she could, but that would probably require getting Mission off him, which could be tricky. Maybe they could—

"Cina." She started, glancing down between herself and the wall — she wasn't sure she'd ever heard Shan use the nickname Mission had given her (which she'd since adopted entirely, calling herself by a name she knew to be fake felt peculiar), but that had _definitely_ been the prissy little Jedi's voice. Shan was staring up at her, looking more...open, perhaps was the word, more open than she had since they'd met, her gaze steady and uncharacteristically frank. "I can do it."

Somehow, she held in an exasperated sigh. Bloody Jedi and their bloody magic powers. "You might as well, I can't think of a better way out of here."

Shan nodded. Before Cina could even reach for the thing, the younger woman tensed, just for the shortest instant, before flinging herself into the air. She rose faster and further than a human should possibly be able to manage from a full stop, meeting the opposite wall of the shaft inches under the bottoms of Zaalbar's feet, planted for a blink before pushing off again, coming to rest against the door, her feet slipping down to find the ledge.

It was rather odd to look at, actually. Only the _very_ tips of Shan's boots were on the ledge, she shouldn't be able to support herself there — not to mention, standing the way she was, her centre of gravity was far out over the shaft, she _should_ just topple right off.

But, well, bloody Jedi and their bloody magic powers.

Cina pulled out her borrowed lightsaber, flicked it on, the shaft suddenly cast in soft blue light and harsh shadow. Measuring the dimensions of the door with her eyes, she reached over and carefully marked the frame at the height she was _almost_ certain the lock should be. Switching it off again, she flipped it around in her hand, held it out toward Shan. "That's about the spot you want."

Somewhat to her surprise, Shan accepted the lightsaber with an oddly solemn nod. That was...peculiar. Did Shan suddenly not hate her anymore? Weird and random, but convenient, she guessed.

Watching Shan drive the glowing blade into the seam, impossibly balanced on thin air, Cina found herself distracted by a comparatively minor detail: her grip on the handle. Reversed in her off hand, her primary hand pushing against the pommel, turned to lock about the base of her thumb, to hold herself from slipping. It was exactly what Cina had done, unthinkingly, opening the previous one. Really, she shouldn't be surprised — she couldn't remember it, but they _had_ been trained by the same people.

It was still very strange, the thought that she'd been a Jedi. The few Jedi she'd met had been... Well, she didn't really seem much like a Jedi, did she? It didn't feel quite real, somehow.

Finally Shan cut through, the doors snapping away into the walls on either side with a dismissive wave of her fingers. And the air was immediately filled with blasterfire. Zaalbar loosened his grip on the wall, sliding down out of the way with a bone shivering scream of protesting metal, but only a tiny percentage of the plasma thrown at Shan actually got past her. She'd taken a single step out onto solid ground, planted there as firm and unbending as stone, lightsaber moving so quickly it formed an arc of static blue light in front of her, as impenetrable as a ray shield.

If watching her practically float on the air had been peculiar, watching this was downright eerie. It was, quite simply, _impossible_ for the human body to move that bloody fast. It was hard to convince her brain it was happening at all, honestly, some instinctive part of her dismissing it, that _had_ to be a solid energy shield around her, her arms weren't _actually_ moving that fast, see how they stopped here and here, she was imagining it. (She was pretty sure she was imagining Shan's arms stopping anywhere at all, with how thick the blasterfire was coming down she'd be dead if she lingered for an instant.)

It _was_ an impressive display, but Shan wouldn't be able to keep it up forever. Over her shoulder, Cina called, "Kandosa, plasma grenades." It took a couple short moments for Kandosa to pass one of his belts of grenades up to Asyr, and then for Asyr to pass it up to Cina. A quick glance at the gleaming metal orbs fixed to the strip of leather confirmed Cina knew how this particular model worked (inexplicably, but that was normal these days). "Shan, coming through on your left." The Jedi didn't acknowledge her directly, but she did drift a bit to the right, in awkward shuffling steps, leaving a narrow gap between metal and lightsaber.

It wasn't quite enough for her to fit through, but she'd just have to trust Shan to not cut her in half.

Cina climbed up a few more rungs, paused a moment to take a last, heavy breath. Then she threw herself to the side, out into empty air, but just for a second, the lip of the frame above the lift doors came upon her quickly, she grabbed at it as it went by, her momentum brought her swinging forward, she let go, and she was falling feet-first. Her arse hit the floor about even with Shan's feet, and the tile was slick enough she kept sliding, letting herself fall backward as she went, the heavy thrum of the lightsaber as it passed over her head who knew how many times a second hardly audible over the high screaming from the constant deluge of blasterfire. Cina planted a foot, turned, rolled, in a second slamming into hard ceramic. Good, there _was_ another long, low planter here — she'd been assuming the floor plan would be more or less the same between levels, the gamble had paid off with her not dying immediately.

A quick peek over the edge, glancing around the room for two or three seconds before fire started tracking toward her, ducked back down again. There were a whole bloody _lot_ of them, but the room wasn't big enough for them to spread out and have enough cover, gathered in clumps partially behind pillars, furniture here and there. Which left no holes in the onslaught, stopping to reload in turns, but it also made them vulnerable. Cina unclipped four of the grenades, pinched off the triggers one by one. She didn't straighten to look, awkwardly tossing the things from flat on her back, aiming by memory.

At the least these plasma grenades, even outnumbering the single concussion one Kandosa had used a few minutes ago, were far quieter. Instead of a sharp, deafening boom, the sound contained by the walls making her skull rattle, there was a quick succession of heavy _whoompfs_ , followed with a thick roar of flame. The agonised keening that followed the initial blast was far louder than the explosions themselves.

Swinging her rifle back around, Cina propped herself up against the planter, peeking over. Her aim had been good, and many of the Exchange men hadn't had time enough to get out of the blast radii — where the clumps of men had once stood were now corpses torn to pieces and scorched a glassy black, those unlucky few not close enough to be killed instantly touched with oily, crawling green and red fire, slapping helplessly at it as it climbed, screaming and flailing. Cina put them out of their misery first, executing the ones she had a good angle on in rapid succession.

(Largely, if she were being completely honest with herself, because their screams were distracting.)

There were perhaps only a dozen who had survived the grenade volley intact. That might _seem_ like a lot — Cina and her team were still outnumbered, and she and Shan were even the only ones in the fight — but they'd been forced out of cover, the atrium might as well be a shooting gallery. Not to mention, the men were making a serious tactical error: they were still focusing on Shan.

That did make a kind of sense, to be fair, Jedi being famously hard to kill and infamously deadly and all, but in this case it was completely idiotic. Cina's grenades had cut their numbers down enough that Shan had the space to aim properly. The bolts that shot by over Cina's head immediately shot back the other direction, right where they'd come from. Her aim wasn't perfect — most of them splashed against floor and walls near the idiots, only finding a couple of them — but the turnabout was enough to make the already panicky men hesitate a little.

Which made them easy pickings for Cina. She managed to down another seven of them with quick shots to the chest before the survivors even seemed to remember she was there. Finally finding their way back to cover, their return fire finally started to track toward her, a couple shots even cutting into the planter, chips of scorching hot ceramic pelting her face and hands. Cina ducked down again, a second before a pair of shots burned through the air where her head had been just before.

But, as tended to happen in these sorts of situations, their attention turning to Cina gave Shan an opportunity to move. By the time Cina felt it as safe to look up again, Shan was standing in the middle of the room, a freshly dismembered corpse sloughing to the ground at her feet. Cina scanned the room for a short moment, but pushed herself up to her feet — they were all dead.

Not that she was entirely surprised: the atrium looked like a bloody war zone. It had been a rather pretty place before, a wide, open space with walls covered in polished wood panels, the floors gleaming ceramic tile, the high ceiling mostly glass, angled panes casting a web of thin shadows across little trees and bushes and flowers from a dozen worlds, a few pillars here and there carved into twisting, curving patterns. Now the floor was half-hidden with four huge blackened circles, pockmarks here and there from uncountable dozens of blaster hits, many of the plants — and, near the epicenter of the plasma explosions, even the ceramic tile itself — were aflame, the air swiftly filling with smoke turned harsh and metallic with industrial chemicals and blood. It was a horror not even counting the bodies, which were a good few steps more awful. A dozen stitched with oozing blaster burns, a few more sliced into pieces with ruthless Jedi precision, but most consumed by grenade fire, the least damaged wet and bloody, the rest almost looking more like glass sculptures than beings, contorted and torn apart, all fluids boiled away, the remains burned so thoroughly long organic chemical chains had broken apart and reformed, the structure turned reflective, almost seeming to gleam under the increasingly muffled sunlight from above.

A part of her, that small, quiet part that was still Cianen Hayal, was sickened, completely horrified. The larger part of her, though, had absolutely no pity for them. In fact, though it did come with a faint sense of guilt, she was taken with a bloody glee — as far as she was concerned, slavers deserved no better than this. They could all burn.

There was a reason, after all, she'd immediately jumped at Kandosa's idea of stealing Kang's ship. If she had to kill _someone_ to get off this festering sinkhole of a planet, they might as well be Exchange thugs.

She heard a low whistle, immediately to her right. Kandosa was standing there, taking in the mayhem with wide eyes, a curious sort of stillness about him. Glancing toward her, his eyebrows cocked, he said, "You work fast, don't you?" He almost sounded — dare she say it? — impressed. Which was something, Mandoade war leaders weren't easily impressed as a rule.

Cina smirked back, reflexively matching his Mandoa. "How selfish of me, I'll try to leave a few for you next time."

Shaking his head to himself, Kandosa let out a low guffaw, his face twisted with a crooked smile.

While Cina was distracted, Shan had walked up to her. Something in her bearing feeling almost...formal, overly respectful, she held Annas's lightsaber back out to her, head dipped and shoulders lowered in a shallow bow.

Cina hesitated, for a brief instant. Shan hadn't been lying: she was a _lot_ more effective with a lightsaber than a blaster. Letting her keep it would make tactical sense. It wasn't like Cina could use it to the full, and it wasn't like it was even _hers_ , not really. But she... She wasn't sure of the words for it, she felt...

Before the decision had even become fully conscious, Cina reached to take it, instinctively mirroring Shan's little bow. She slipped the thing back into its spot on her belt, patting it once to ensure it was hitched firm.

She couldn't explain exactly what it was. She just felt more comfortable with it. More of her old self must be bubbling to the surface than she'd thought.

All of them finally gathered again, they were just about to set off when Shan stuttered to a halt only a handful of steps after starting up. Cina turned to her, saw her face had gone shockingly pale, mouth dropping open and eyes wide. Her head was turned a bit to the west, staring unfocused out into the distance.

"Shan? What are—" Cina's own voice cut off with a sharp gasp, drawn by the sudden shiver, starting low in her back and running its way up, the back of her neck tingling. Her breath had turned harsh and thin in an instant, her hands shaking hard enough her rifle rattled. "Okay, what the fuck was—"

It struck again, but where the last twinged this one _burned_. The fire shot up her spine in an instant, forced itself into her head, bursting against the back of her eyes in splashes of bright, sickening colour. The atrium swirled around her, she would have fallen without Zaalbar appearing at her side to prop her up, and her head just got hotter and hotter, that spot over her left ear throbbing, the incomprehensible swirl of foreign colour pushed harder, overwhelming—

— _blared and displays filled with static, the fighter bucked and rolled, she fought to pull it straight again, fought to remain conscious, the tide of terror and agony and_ cold _washing over her, it almost took her down with her, she didn't need to see the surface of Serocco to know what—_

 _She would kill him for this. She_ should _kill him for this, he'd—_

 _It came as an instant flash of agonising heat, just an instant, so short there wasn't even time to be surprised, just fire and pain and fear, then_ nothing _, cold endless_ nothing _, a thousand times, a_ thousand _thousand—_

 _Cina! Focus, Cina!_

— _shook with the percussion of one air burst after another, fire and shrapnel creating a cacophony she couldn't even hear herself think through, where the_ fuck _was their air support, she—_

— _she felt the ship breaking apart tear through her, the force of fifty thousand voices going silent deafening, hitting hard enough she staggered, hitching against the holoprojector, she thought she might be sick, but she fought it, pretended Saul wasn't watching, focused on the battle out—_

 _Yes, focus! Pull yourself away, you can't get—_

— _down at the surface of Telos, the planet marred with innumerable scars black and brown, so large they were visible from space, a sickly, orange cast to the acidified atmosphere, and she tasted lightning on her tongue, she felt thick and heavy with fury warring against despair, this was all_ wrong _, she hadn't—_

— _hit her during dinner, she felt it, she_ knew _, and the others knew, she'd felt them recoil, and she lifted her mug, toasted the Second Fleet, and the jira tasted like blood—_

— _chewed across their position, and she tried not to wince at the chill of death washing past her, cast it aside—_

Something else forced itself along the tide of fire and death, something steadier, something more solid. Something reached out to her, interspersing itself between Cina's own mind and something outside of it. She hadn't been conscious of her mind as a _thing_ , a discrete object, until something _was_ inserted between it and something else, and yet when the realisation struck it was natural, she hardly had to wonder about it at all. Somehow, without knowing exactly how she knew, she knew this _something_ was another mind, forgotten instinct telling her it was human, one she'd—

— _not like this, not like_ this _, she wouldn't allow it to end, not like this—_

—been in contact with before. The tide hadn't retreated entirely, it was still there, the echoing fires of agony and the bone-chilling draw of oblivion filtered through the mind surrounding hers, weaker. The internal echoes, suppressed memory yanked to the surface, those grew quieter as well, fuzzy and indistinct. Her sense of herself faded back, she knew strong, fuzzy hands under her arms were holding her up, two softer hands cupping her cheeks, fingers dug into her hair, much as the familiar mind encircled her own.

Shan's face was inches away, hard, brown eyes staring steadily into hers. "You must hold yourself together for at least a few minutes more. Focus on the moment, Cina, push it all away from you."

Another line of fire raced up her spine, a chill wind from nowhere cutting to the bone, the floor bucking under her feet, but it didn't penetrate as it had before, the shield about her (Shan, that was Shan) keeping away the worst. "The Sith, they're bombarding the city."

"Not yet. But they will."

"How long?"

Something passed across Shan's face, something pained, shamed, just an instant before vanishing again. "Two, three minutes. We have to keep going, Cina. Focus."

Right. She could do that. Cina took a deep breath, and dug in her heels (metaphorically), staring back at Shan, trying to see her, to know nothing else but what was right in front of her, keep out the...

The _Force_. That's what that had to be. Premonitions of events about to pass, echoing through the fabric of the galaxy and into her.

Despite herself, she couldn't help a brief moment of shock. She'd already known she'd been a Jedi, before, but it was still... It was just surreal, a little.

(And yet, somehow, natural, as though she'd always known she had magic bloody powers.)

Once she'd shook that thought of, she shook it _all_ off, the world narrowing, slowly, to the here and now. And she saw Shan, and only Shan, but she didn't just _see_ her. She... It was like she could _feel_ her, a tactile awareness of the shape of her face, of her body, the heat leaching out into the air, and not just Shan, but Zaalbar behind her, Mission anxiously hovering at her shoulder, Asyr, Carth, and Kandosa a short space away, eyes on the entrances, fitfully fidgeting, and not just them, but all the room, the floor and the plants and the furniture and the corpses, as though it were all pressed against her skin, soft and sharp and cold and hot and—

Cina drew in a shuddering breath, forced a modicum of strength into her quivering knees. Her nerves still burned, her head over her left ear still throbbed, but she could stand on her own at least. As Zaalbar released her, Shan's mind pulled away. The heat flared, she winced at the sharp pain in her head, but the tide of fate and memory was held back, so thin it was as a faint buzzing in her ears.

She nodded. "Right." Her own voice sounded thin, dry. "Let's get out of here." Shrugging her rifle back into place, she turned for the exit heading north, started off.

She tried not to notice how everyone was staring at her.

From there on, the corridors were remarkably empty. Empty by a certain definition, at least — every few metres there were potted plants, some varieties she didn't even recognise, paintings and sculptures made by artists of a dozen varied species. The glitzy halls were so full in places it was almost hard to get through, their party having to turn to squeeze through single file.

It was mostly barren of _people_ , though. A couple of times, they'd stumble on more Exchange thugs, no more than three at a time. They weren't at all hard to deal with — Cina's unnerving new awareness of her surroundings had her feeling them before she could see them, snapping off shots at their faces even as they came around corners. There were less guards than she would have expected, but perhaps they'd simply thrown most of their people at the defence at the lifts, hadn't had time yet for reinforcements to come in. Whatever the reason, they were hardly slowed at all on the way to the hanger, Cina and Kandosa easily cutting down what pathetic resistance they did run into.

Even if Cina hadn't memorised the floorplan of the place, she still would have recognised the doors into the hanger: they were wider and taller than the others along the hall, expensive, polished wood replaced with reinforced durasteel, treated to resist the wake from space-capable ion engines. (At speeds safe in atmo, anyway, exposed to ion propulsion at full tilt these doors would be incinerated in an instant.) They were, of course, closed, and apparently sealed, since hitting the open key on the control panel didn't do anything. She _could_ cut through it, but this was some seriously high-quality metal, it'd take far, far longer than the much flimsier elevator doors had.

But the direct approach wasn't always the best one. This sort of problem was exactly what slicers were for. Before Cina had even said anything Mission had sidled up, already prying the panel open with that skinny little vibroblade of hers. The rest of them settled in to wait, Asyr and Carth and Kandosa marking out a weak perimeter — Kandosa, with bull-headed industriousness characteristic of Mandoade, knocked over a nearby sculpture, the closest thing to cover they could expect in the middle of a hallway.

Cina watched Mission work, but she _really_ didn't have the expertise to know how it was going. She'd spliced herself into the security system easily enough, hooking the thing at the end of the cable dangling from her datapad into the circuits under the panel, seemingly picking a place at random. (At least, it hadn't seemed distinctive to Cina.) The holoprojector Mission wore on her wrist had flickered into life, a three-dimensional shape composed of what looked like lines of code floating in front of her, twisting and turning and peeling away and inverting at gestures of her fingers, when she wasn't manipulating that tapping away at her datapad in an almost constant rhythm.

So _that's_ what that holoprojector was for. Not that she really had any fucking clue at all what was going on here, but it was clear this was helpful somehow. She'd wondered why the girl carried that around all the time.

There was a single blaster shot, the heavier, lower groan of Kandosa's clunky disruptor. A quick glance up, there was another guard that direction, already slumping to the ground, a significant portion of his head and neck atomised. "How's it look, Mission?"

"The ship is still there, but the bay doors are open." Her voice was higher than usual, stuttering a little, but she was doing an impressive job holding together for her age. (Though age was relative, the lower city likely hadn't allowed Mission much of a childhood.) "Which means Kang's probably on the way to his ship, if he's not there already."

"The lock?"

"Give me a few seconds, sheesh, the security on this isn't anything to—"

Something forced its way into her again, but not the fiery agony of countless beings suffering, the chill of them dying. Instead of running up her spine in a wave it seemed to strike all at once, a peculiar alertness coming alive, a vibrating tension, like glass ringing from an impact, hard enough it hurt—

The lightsaber appeared in her hand, she didn't remember reaching for it, the blade sprang into life. An instant later, blue plasma was struck with orange, roughly two-thirds of the way up the blade, the blaster bolt spanging off to burn into the ceiling. The force of the hit was as a sudden weight settling on her hand, nearly turning her wrist back, but she, somehow, held it perfectly in place. If it had been pushed back, after all, the blade would have sheared right through the back of Mission's head.

That blaster shot, if it hadn't been stopped, would have hit Mission in the back of the head. Cina had stopped it, she hadn't meant to, she'd hardly even been aware of—

Mission should be dead right now.

More bolts were flying from more blasters, but Cina hardly noticed. She was too distracted by that simple, horrifying thought — that piece of trash, right there down the hall, shooting at them with a couple of his friends, Mission would be dead because of him. Rage hit all at once, harsh and overwhelming and _cold_. But it didn't keep to itself, it mixed with that low heat at the small of her back she'd been trying to push away, and they rose together, jagged fire climbing up her throat, and her blood sparked and sang with it, lightning on her tongue, she felt abruptly too big for her own body, the roiling flames and slashing ice too _much_ to fit inside her skull, and it built and built, until she thought she would burst like an overripe fruit, and then it built more, and more, and _more_ , and—

Her augmented fury leapt out of her, sudden and hard, with a sharp jerk. And it rushed away, down the hall, the air rippling with a shock wave inaudible and (mostly) invisible. In a blink, it reached the Exchange slime.

A blink later, and the four of them were plastered against the wall, looking more like some obscene work of art than living beings, just another painting along the garish hall.

Huh. Lucky she hadn't shoved Desa quite that hard, that time in the library. If she was going to accidentally kill someone, she would much rather it be a few Exchange thugs than her (mostly forgotten) cousin.

Cina tore her eyes away, turning back to Mission. "Sooner would be better." Her own voice came out shaky, thin, as though she were out of breath, as though she'd been running for miles. And it wasn't the only thing, she felt suddenly weak, muscles twitching with exhaustion, and she was slowly losing control, she could feel it, like sand slipping through her fingers grain by grain. Pain and despair and screaming not her own was boiling under the surface, stronger with every second, shadowy flickers from the life of a woman whose name she still didn't know rising in the wake, and she didn't know how much longer she could keep it down.

To her credit, Mission only stared at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, for a couple more seconds before getting right back to it.

She wasn't looking that direction, couldn't actually see her, but she still felt Shan inch up behind her, the air about her thick with wariness a shade away from terror. Her voice in a low whisper, "Cina? Are you all right?"

Cina worked her tongue against the roof of her mouth for a moment, forcing the dryness away best she could. (When had that happened, she hadn't noticed.) "As soon as we get on the ship, I'm knocking myself out with a sedative."

"That...might be a good idea."

Despite herself, she couldn't help a snort of black laughter. _Might?_ She could feel it, the bombardment had started, waves of agony and death crashing against her, so much more intense than the premonition of it had been in the atrium. The force of it had her teetering on her heels, it was all she could do to just remain standing, took all the will she had just to focus on the present moment. And it would only get worse, they'd just started in on it. If she had more outbursts like that one just now...

She wouldn't be surprised if she somehow unintentionally blew up the ship before they even got into orbit. It would be safer for everyone if she was unconscious.

Luckily, she didn't have to wait very long. Only a few short moments of peculiar, uncomfortable staring later, and the door was sliding open. Cina was walking out into the hangar before Mission had gotten her equipment disentangled. The hanger was a perfectly ordinary single-ship landing bay, she was sure, but in the moment she hardly even saw it, nor the ship inside it.

Instead, her awareness focused entirely on two figures, approaching the boarding ramp. One was a middle-aged man, with greying hair and heavy jowls, in gleaming armor too fancy to truly be effective, carrying a blaster rifle with awkwardness enough to imply he hadn't actually touched one in years. The second was younger, shorter and slimmer, wearing a long blue and orange leather coat and, absurdly, bulging black goggles over his eyes. Cina measured the distance with her eyes, they were too close, they'd be inside and have the door sealed before she could catch up. She could maybe shoot them from this range, but with one of the landing struts in the way, it wasn't a sure thing.

Kang and his henchman were going to make it.

No. No, they weren't.

Cina was hardly conscious of it, it didn't feel quite real, like she were flying, gliding over the floor instead of walking upon it. The hanger whipped by her so fast she could hardly even see it herself, her vision narrowing, her surroundings blurring. The peculiarly-dressed henchman was quick, had both of his blasters drawn and aimed in a blink, two bursts of yellow-orange plasma crawling across the air towards her, slow enough it was easy to put the blade of her lightsaber between them — she hadn't realised she'd turned the thing on again — the first shot pinging against the underside of the ship, the second turning back to strike the man in the shoulder, sending him reeling back.

The tip of the blade went down, and then back up, Cina planted her toes, coming to a stop, the blade coming down again.

Kang and his flamboyant henchman fell to the ground, both of them neatly bisected.

The flames coursing through her veins quickly drained away, slipping away from her with each breath. (It tasted like blood, like a summer storm.) She'd hardly realised it was there, but its sudden absence left her feeling tired, somehow...smaller, than she'd been before. Smaller and emptier. Some part of her, something wild and instinctive, wanted to fill herself with it again, wanted to reach for it, wanted to pull that fire into herself, so much of it her blood sang and her nerves burned, it didn't matter if she took in too much, she wanted it, she needed it to feel—

Cina forced the downward spiral out of her head with a sharp sigh. She blinked, the hanger around her swimming more into proper shape with each blink. The rest of them were still over by the door, some twenty metres away, still and staring.

Not that Cina could blame them — she _had_ just pulled magic powers out of her arse. If she could allow herself a moment to process what was happening she'd probably be freaking out too.

"Well? Are you coming or not?"

* * *

With a flicker of pseudomotion hardly visible at this angle, the tiny freighter winked out of existence. Saul let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

Though perhaps that was a little premature. Alek was standing only a few steps away, looming over him, gaze fixed out the viewport toward where the ship had been. He was still, unnaturally still, looking more statue than man. But while he seemed less than alive, something about the air around him was not — a heavy charge on the air, something thick and cold, lightning a breath from striking. He was furious, obviously, there was no doubt about that.

And Saul knew exactly why. When Alek had ordered they focus everything they could on that one, seemingly insignificant freighter, one ship among many fleeing the planet, he'd known. There'd been an uncharacteristic note of urgency on his voice, he'd seemed so, so _desperate_ , as Saul hadn't heard him in years, what felt like a lifetime ago, when they'd both still fought for the Republic. Saul knew exactly who was on that ship.

She'd made it out. She was alive.

 _She's alive_.

Alek turned, just his head, the rest of his body still solid and unmoving. He directed a heavy glower down at Saul — though the word "glower" might be underselling it a bit. It was a look that communicated with its every inch utmost hatred, promised death, a death more painful than mortal imagination could possibly comprehend. It was hard, and cold, and merciless, and were they any other people in any other situation Saul might even be intimidated.

But the feeling didn't come. ( _She's alive._ ) Alek might be a few narrow steps short of total madness at this point, but he knew as well as Saul did that their failure to bring down the freighter wasn't their fault, not his. It was, in fact Alek's. He'd ordered them to direct all their resources, everything they had in orbit, toward atomizing the city, leveling the entire planet. Whoever was flying the freighter knew what he was doing: he'd picked a vector that put him as far from their guns as possible. None of their capital ships could reorient themselves in time to take the shot, there wasn't enough time for them to assign fighters to pursue. By the time Alek had given the order, it was already most likely impossible to fulfill.

Even were this failure truly his, Alek couldn't kill him for it. Saul was the best admiral they had — the only reason he hadn't been made Supreme Commander was because the Assembly felt his talents were most useful on the front lines. Alek's incompetent, amateur bungling of the campaign would have done a _lot_ more damage if Saul weren't around to clean up his messes as much as was possible.

(The impetuous idiot only had to follow Lesami's strategy to the letter. If he'd just gone ahead with her plan, the Republic should have been on the edge of defeat by now. But of course he couldn't control himself. Even when he'd still been a conventional Jedi, Alek hadn't been the most temperate man he'd ever met.)

But, that wasn't the only reason Saul was irreplaceable. He wasn't just the Sith's most effective military leader — he was also their _first_ military leader. (Excluding Lesami herself, of course.) A significant portion of the men of their fleet native to Republic space held, he knew, no small degree of personal loyalty to him. In the early days of the Empire, he'd been one of the symbols the fledgling state had rallied around — to his aggravation, Lesami had finally gotten her revenge for springing that promotion on her years ago — enough he was just as much an institution in their new nation as Lesami, or Nisotsa, or Alek himself.

With Lesami's death ( _she's alive_ ), with Nisotsa forced out of office on a transparently vacuous pretense, with Alek and his cronies' own excesses, the Empire was already starting to fracture. Alek was one wrong move from sparking a civil war. Saul wasn't certain killing him in a rage would be that wrong move, but he _was_ certain it was possible.

Alek couldn't kill him. Not now, and possibly not ever. Saul knew that.

More importantly, Alek surely knew it too.

Shakily, with the stiff, unsteady gait of a droid overdue for essential maintenance, Alek turned on his heel and shuffled across the bridge. He was usually a very imposing man, but the way he was moving now, something indefinable was missing from his normal ethos, the Sith Lord appearing somehow less than he usually did. In a few brief seconds he was gone, taking the oppressive sense of danger with him.

Saul, with no real conscious decision on his part, found his eyes falling down to Kanyr's.

She hadn't protested, when she'd realized what was about to happen. Not for an instant. She hadn't even known why, why he'd had to do it. She'd just... She'd just stared up at him, grim but calm. She'd met his eyes, and there was no fear there, just a rueful sort of acceptance, and... _trust_. Kanyr trusted him, believed in him, knew there had to be a reason, a _good_ reason, if Saul chose to do it it _must_ be the correct choice. She trusted him, completely.

And he'd shot her in the head.

He thought, morbidly, that he wished he'd aimed a little lower. Her eyes were intact, still staring back at him, filled with accusation, with hatred, that was more his own than it was hers.

"Admiral?" That would be Rahn, wondering if Saul had any further orders. (He refused to consider the possibility that the Captain was concerned for him.) Saul properly should turn to face him, but he didn't. He knew he would find in his eyes that trust, that same unyielding faith that Kanyr had shown him in her last moments.

Sometimes, Saul wished they would stop looking at him like that. Sometimes, he thought his spine might shatter from the weight.

Before Rahn could get any ideas, Saul said, "Continue the bombardment, Captain." He hesitated for a moment — oh, hell, it wasn't like Alek was even here anymore. "Inform the fleet their performance during this particular engagement shall not be considered during any future evaluation of their effectiveness or their loyalty."

A very brief pause. "Understood, sir." And he did understand, Saul could hear it on his voice.

Saul couldn't _directly_ halt the bombardment, not without disobeying an explicit order from Alek, which would give the lunatic the perfect excuse should he ever decide to do away with him one day. But he _could_ give his people leeway to sabotage it themselves on the sly. They couldn't refuse to fire entirely, no, Alek would notice that. But, if a review of the "battle" later showed their gunners fired unusually slowly, and with pitiful accuracy not displayed during any other engagement in their careers, well, Saul was sure that would just be an unfortunate coincidence. There was a glitch in the targeting systems, all the caf had been brewed too weak, the sun was in their eyes. He needn't bother coming up with a plausible excuse, he doubted Alek would even look into it. He couldn't stop the assault on Taris, but he would soften it as much as his position allowed.

He knew his people would take the suggestion. He'd given similar orders before, and he doubted they relished the exercise of executing billions of Imperial citizens for absolutely no reason at all any more than he did.

"Get to it, then."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." And Rahn left him, the sharp clicks of his boots steadily drawing a straight line toward coms.

There wasn't anything that particularly needed his involvement at the moment, so Saul had no particular reason to move. Instead he just stood there, staring down at Kanyr. Her death was his fault, of course — if he hadn't recruited her to humor his desperate hopes, she would still be alive — but hers was hardly the first. He tried not to think about just much blood there was on his hands. It was overwhelming when he did, he had to...

Lesami had said, long ago, that sometimes one had to die for more, and sometimes more had to die for many. Sometimes hundreds of thousands had to die for all the uncounted trillions. The Jedi had found her honesty on the topic abhorrent, which was really more confusing than anything. The concept was natural to Saul, to virtually every career soldier he'd ever met. Lesami had simply put words to the unvoiced idea at the very core of their profession. After all, they had willingly made of themselves those who might die so others might not. What the Jedi and many civilians in the Republic thought was horrifying tragedy they thought was simple math.

All too often lately — and today especially, with Taris burning behind him and Kanyr dead at his feet — Saul wasn't certain the math worked out as it should.

 _She's alive_. That was worth it. It would be worth it, it _had_ to be.

It had to be.

* * *

Proving — _A series of events held at the Temple on Coruscant every four months, intended to allow initiates (who've passed their trials or otherwise gotten approval) to attract masters to continue their training. Analogous to canonical Exhibition Day and the Apprentice Tournament._

Reassignment — _The Council of Reassignment, one of the lower ruling councils of the Jedi Order overseeing the Service Corps. For those not in the know, Jedi initiates who aren't up to snuff or are never chosen as an apprentice(/padawan) are shuffled into the Service Corps, sort of half-Jedi who provide various services for the Republic. It's usually the Council of Reassignment who makes the final call on whether an initiate should be pulled out._

Ac̳ika — _I debated for a while how to represent that first consonant before deciding on a diacritic that could easily be ignored (assuming it deigns to display properly). In IPA, this would be approximated_ /ɐ.ǂi.kʰa/ _. "Approximated" because alien phonology isn't necessarily perfectly transcribable with a script meant to represent human language, but close enough. That first consonant is a palatal click, which irl only exists in a handful of Khoisan languages. People who have no idea how to make those sounds can just pronounce this name "uh-kee-kah", I used the simplest characters possible to make it easier to read on purpose._

Pseudomotion — _For those unaware, this is the term used in the books for the optical effects seen when ships enter/exit hyperspace._

* * *

 _Not at all sure if much of this chapter works the way I tried to make it work, but it is what it is._

 _Oh, yeah, so... This is still a thing? After two months? Whoops?_

 _Long story short, I've been distracted by the collab fic I'm doing with LeighaGreene and very irritating medical problems. Especially irritating because I've gotten an exhaustive suite of tests over the last couple months and they have no fucking clue what's causing it. Good fun. Basically, medical issues cutting down the energy available for writing, and what little I have ends up directed toward **All According to Plan** to (futilely) try to keep up with Leigha's output. So this fic ended up being shafted for a bit there. Oops._

 _There has been a marginal improvement lately — or maybe I'm just getting better at powering through it, who knows — so updates will hopefully go back to being more frequent. We'll have to see._

 _This (and **AAtP** ) might be my last major fanfic ever, actually. I've started making the transition toward original fiction. I've even stopped reading fanfic entirely now. So...there's that. I do still plan to finish this fic (at least through the end of KotOR I, but preferably the whole thing), because it entertains me and I'm irritated with leaving fics half-finished, but that'll likely be it._

 _~Wings_


	11. Drawing Lines — I

_Sesai was drawn out of sleep by a shiver running through the bed, only a slight dip down then up. Had it happened a few minutes later, once he was more thoroughly under, he might not have woken at all. He opened his eyes, the darkened room too shadowed and blurry to make anything out. A few blinks helped the latter, but as his vision got clearer the shadows only grew more prominent, more alive, shifting back and forth as light struck into the room at random, unpredictable angles. Even indirectly, light blue and white and violet playing against the wall and ceiling, he recognized the ineffable maelstrom of hyperspace._

 _Not that he'd expected to see anything else. There were all sorts of ridiculous superstitions surrounding space travel that had managed to persist through the millennia, one of the more widespread involving the chaotic colors and patterns of hyperspace. It was common knowledge that looking out into it for too long would drive a being insane — completely fictional knowledge, obviously, but people did enjoy their flights of fancy. Even those who didn't buy into that sort of thing often felt uncomfortable gazing out into hyperspace, something instinctual to most beings protesting as space twisted and broke apart in front of them, the plain_ wrongness _of it instilling an eerie sense of unease._

 _Lesami, on the other hand, just thought it was pretty. When the_ Vindicta _had been being retrofitted after the discovery of the Forge, Lesami had made sure the admiral's quarters — most often hers, being her favored flagship — had a tall, wide bay of windows looking out. Even in the bloody bedroom. The transparisteel could be made opaque with the push of a button, but she left it open more often than not, even slept under the dancing lights._

 _But she'd sort of been insane to begin with._

 _So he wasn't surprised at all to see her there, leaning against the frame, staring out into riotous nothingness. There was a subtle sense of exhaustion in the way she slumped there, arms crossed low over her stomach, head resting against the window._

 _And she hadn't bothered tracking down any clothes, the glow throwing her profile into sharp relief. Which was just_ cruel _._

 _Sesai held back the first thing that occurred to him to say, too suggestive. Not that Lesami had a problem with suggestive, normally, she tended to enjoy him quite a lot (in multiple senses of the word), but there was a time for everything, and he knew this simply wasn't it._

 _And then he held back the second thing._

 _And the third._

 _...And the fourth._

" _Can't sleep?"_

 _Lesami shook her head, hair shuffling against her shoulders. He still thought long hair looked odd on her — all Jedi kept their hair short, barring a few exceptions here and there for one cultural reason or another. She hadn't started growing it out until after Malachor, after Csilla even, he still wasn't entirely used to it. She did have nice hair, of course, which she had to be aware of, and Lesami had never been entirely immune to vanity. (That was on the list of problems the Masters had had with her, in fact.) But, he remembered, back at the Temple, way back when they'd been children, she'd said longer hair was impractical, it just got in the way._

 _These days she took rather more care with her appearance in general, actually. He guessed that sort of thing was just expected of empresses._

" _Don't let me keep you up. You have a busy day tomorrow."_

 _Sesai snorted — that was one way of putting it, all right. The invasion of the Republic was starting tomorrow. They'd been in Republic space for nearly a week, actually, delicately paralleling hyperspace routes across half the galaxy. (That would be insanely dangerous, if they hadn't the Force to help them aim.) Around five in the morning — reckoned by local time at the Citadel, back on Dromund Kaas — they'd be dropping out of hyperspace within a short jump from Centares. Sesai, along with a plethora of other operatives and diplomats, would disembark there, slip into the Republic to pursue whatever their respective assignments were._

 _Sesai was to return to Coruscant and infiltrate the Republic bureaucracy, find a way to slip himself into the Senate and the Temple. He had a list of names he was to try to recruit, if at all possible. He had a separate list of names, all of whom Lesami wanted dead._

 _It was just like Lesami to call embarking on a dangerous mission of espionage and assassination a "busy day"._

 _Of course, Lesami had a "busy day" too — immediately after dropping off Sesai and the others, the rest of the fleet would take two quick hops rimward along the Perlemian, to Columex. Where Lesami would command the opening battle of the war against the Republic. Really, her day would be far more draining than his. He'd just be slipping into the crowd and catching a transport coreward, really not that big of a deal._

 _He considered a few different comments again before finally picking one. "You know, you really don't do anyone any good if you're too exhausted to think straight."_

 _There was a brief flare of something..._ something _, he couldn't quite put words to it. Something heavy, almost suffocating. Lesami let out a brief sigh, the only external sigh she was feeling anything at all. "I know. I can always take an hour to meditate before the battle, it'll be fine."_

 _That_ really _wasn't a solution for the long term. But Lesami knew that just as well as he did, there was no point saying so. Latching on to the low-boiling discomfort shimmering in the air around her — Lesami had always been uneasy shouldering too much responsibility, which he guessed made her some kind of masochist — he decided to change the subject. Well, sort of. "I could help you get to sleep."_

 _She turned away from the window. At this angle, it was hard to be sure, the way the shadows spilled across her face, but he was pretty sure she was giving him one of those flat, unimpressed looks of hers. "As I recall, you've already tried to wear me out twice tonight. Didn't get us anywhere, did it?"_

" _Well, you know what they say: try, try, try again."_

 _With a snorted laugh, Lesami shook her head. "You are persistent, I'll give you that."_

" _That's what you pay me for."_

" _I_ don't _pay you for that."_

" _Not for the sex." He smiled. "No, you just pay me to kill people you don't like. I'm good at that too."_

 _The shadows crossing her face seemed to get darker. That same odd something radiated out from her, just for a second before she pushed it away again. Somewhat jerkily, she turned to gaze out the window again, her posture and her presence both as expressionless as the wall behind her._

" _That was a joke." It wasn't, not really, and they both knew it. The willingness to kill whoever she told him to_ because _she told him to, that's not a joke. He did trust her to choose the right people, of course — assassination was serious business, he didn't go around killing people just for fun — but honestly, when it came down to it, he didn't even really think about it. He didn't care_ why _Lesami wanted someone dead, just that she did, and he was in a position to get her what she wanted._

 _Saying it quite that bluntly, though,_ that _was a joke._

" _Put my foot in it again, I know. You know me, Sami, I'm really bad at not doing that."_

 _That, at least, had another rebellious laugh forcing its way out of her nose. It was rather thin and cold, but at least it was there. "I still don't know how you ever manage to maintain your cover. You can hardly get through a normal conversation without saying something idiotic."_

" _Most people are idiots." He shrugged. "Besides, nobody ever suspects the Zeltron."_

 _Lesami matched his shrug, acknowledging the point. Sesai's people did have a reputation for being self-destructively short-sighted and pathologically hedonistic — generally speaking, people suspected Zeltrons were out to seduce practically everyone they met, but they were the_ last _beings most would expect to be up to something nefarious. His "cover" usually involved just...acting like a stereotypical Zeltron. It was surprisingly effective._

 _Those stereotypes were completely accurate, of course, but that was neither here nor there._

 _But anyway, he figured that was enough distraction to actually get to the point. "So, are you going to tell me what's wrong this time?" It could go either way, really, Lesami being a rather private person she leaned toward not talking about what was going on in her head. Well, not about personal issues, anyway. Honestly, the tendency many other peoples had to, just, keep things to themselves was still baffling to him — he hadn't spent very much of his life on Zeltros, the Jedi had come for him when he'd been only five (standard) years old, but he'd still absorbed enough of the culture that certain things just didn't click. Zeltrosi were as a rule far more open, the impulse toward privacy many other beings had still felt strange._

 _Lesami let out a long sigh, sagging a bit against the frame. "How is it you put it? I'm surrendering to my impulse to think everything to death, and then keep tearing it apart until it's completely unrecognisable."_

" _Something like that." When he'd said it, he'd probably been a bit cruder about it, but the central idea sounded like the sort of thing he would have said. "What is it this time?"_

" _Does it matter?"_

" _If it's bothering you this much, obviously it does."_

 _For a long moment, Lesami didn't respond, just stared out into hyperspace in perfect silence, hardly even seeming to breathe. Though maybe it was just hard to see, the swirling light throwing shifting shadows._

 _Sesai just waited. Either she'd decide to tell him, or she wouldn't, nothing he could say would sway her either way. He was nearly certain she would — he was in a rather privileged position when it came to this sort of thing. They had known each other for most of their lives, and he was, well, himself. He couldn't imagine anything that could be going on in there that he would ever...he didn't know, judge her for. Normal people were judgy sometimes, it got irritating. (Maybe that was why they kept so much to themselves, come to think of it.) That she was even considering it at all suggested she was leaning toward telling him. She still had to think about it, because Lesami was overcautious about this sort of thing, but he was pretty sure._

 _And he was proven right after a minute or so. "Do you ever wonder if we're doing the right thing?"_

 _He blinked. "No."_

 _Her shoulders jerked with a start, and she turned back to face him again. With her profile throwing shadows deep across her face, it was hard to tell for sure, but he suspected that was a confused frown. "No? You never think about it at all?"_

" _You know," Sesai said, an involuntary smile pulling at his lips, "it's a little odd to bother asking a question you very clearly expected a particular answer to."_

That _one was probably a glare. "Don't try to talk like Kreia. You're terrible at it."_

 _Well, yeah, he suspected he would be. He didn't understand half the confusing shit that came out of Lesami's eccentric old master's mouth. Listening to the two of them talk just gave him a headache. "_ Mai-mai _, not the point. Is that it? You're having second thoughts?"_

" _Sesai, we're trying to_ overthrow the Republic _."_

" _More than_ trying _, I hope. Would be rather embarrassing if all this work came out to nothing."_

 _Lesami let out a low sound, somewhere between a chuckle and a scoff. "And that doesn't bother you at all? It wasn't that long ago we were fighting to_ defend _the Republic."_

" _Maybe_ you _were." He shrugged. "Well, fighting to defend the_ people _of the Republic, anyway, that's not quite the same thing."_

" _What do you mean, maybe_ I _was? You were there too, you might recall, as long as I was."_

 _Sesai opened his mouth to answer on reflex — then cut himself off, hard enough his throat made a little gulping sound. He hesitated a moment, tongue working against his teeth, considering how exactly he should put it. Or whether he should put it at all. If he couldn't feel the subtle heat of Lesami's impatience against his skin, he might have chosen to say nothing. "I'm not sure you want to hear it, Sami."_

 _She snorted. "If people only told me what I wanted to hear, we wouldn't be here."_

 _That was certainly true. "Well, fine. Just don't get all...mopey."_

" _Mopey?" The single word came in that low, dangerous tone she'd developed during the war, but missing the frigid sense of danger that usually came with it. She felt more amused than anything._

" _I suspect you're going to perfect brooding at this rate, all the practice you've gotten in lately."_

" _Sometimes I wonder if you're trying to annoy me."_

" _Only sometimes. Anyway, what I was saying. I didn't do all this for the reasons you did. I just, um..." He trailed off, biting his lip. They'd never talked about this, but somehow he just knew she was going to hate this, quite a lot. "Honestly, I wouldn't have left to fight the Mandalorians if it were anyone else suggesting it. I wouldn't be here now if it were anyone else. I don't think about whether we're doing the right thing, because..." He grasped for the right words for a second, couldn't find any he quite liked, shrugged it off. "I don't know. Worrying about that sort of thing is your job. I just do what you tell me."_

 _She_ didn't _like that. Her face was impossible to make out clearly, but he could feel the unease washing off of her, thick and dark and nauseating. He'd noticed this before, over the course of the war, as she gradually accumulated influence and power. Only all the more since she'd taken over and remade the Sith Empire. She hid it well, but Sesai knew her better than most people did. (Not to mention, Zeltron telepathy was sort of cheating.) She didn't trust herself with power. It terrified her._

 _Which was sort of hilarious, really, given she'd literally just usurped a throne not that long ago. But, as far as he was concerned, people who didn't_ like _power were the ones best suited to have it. So he wasn't complaining, it was just kinda funny._

 _Quieter, hardly above a whisper, she said, "What if I'm wrong?"_

 _He shrugged. "Wrong by who's definition? Right and wrong are a matter of opinion. I'm inclined to trust yours."_

" _I wish you wouldn't say things like that."_

" _Then don't ask next time."_

 _Lesami let out a harsh huff, shaking her head to herself. "I did walk into that, I guess."_

 _He smirked. "You do have a habit of walking into things. Blasterfire, mostly."_

" _I guess," she said, a hint of laughter bleeding into her voice, "at least I manage to make it out untouched most of the time."_

" _Only most of the time?" Sesai didn't remember Lesami ever being_ seriously _injured — there had been a few near misses, but..._

" _One of those things I walk into is your bed."_

 _Shaking with a low chuckle, he said, "There is that. I see you've gone back to punning. Does that mean I managed to help?"_

" _Not really." That was underselling it somewhat — again, Zeltron telepathy was cheating. That heavy cloud hanging over her, growing far too familiar these days, that was still there. But it had retreated somewhat, if only a little, leaving Lesami feeling softer, looser. If only a little, if only for the moment._

 _Sesai nearly said something about that, again, but bit his tongue. It really wasn't his place. More to the point, she wouldn't do anything about it anyway._

" _But it'll do for now. Just..." Lesami fidgeted a little, her feet shuffling. "Just, don't... If you do ever think I'm going too far, say something about it."_

 _He didn't think that particularly likely — Lesami was far better at managing her own worst impulses than he would be. But there was no use in arguing the point. "Sure, I can do that. You coming back to bed, then?"_

" _What, you're looking to_ help me get to sleep _again?"_

" _I certainly wouldn't say no..."_

 _Shaking her head to herself, Lesami pushed off the wall, started back for the bed. He couldn't tell for sure, but he thought that there might be an exasperated look. "You're incorrigible, you know."_

 _Oh, he did. There wasn't a whole lot he could do about that, and he didn't really care to try._

 _Of course, given that Lesami was already straddling him ten seconds later, she probably didn't care too much either._

* * *

Cina lingered at the door, watching silently. She wasn't sure she'd be welcome.

After waking up from her little drug-assisted nap, things were...different. She meant, it hadn't really gone away. The Force stuff. It was still there. _Everything_ was still there — she could feel the contours of the inside of the ship, every surface, all the fixtures, all around her, she could feel their shape and their texture as clearly as though she were actually touching it all, with the very tips of her fingers, all of it at once. It was a bit disorienting, really, too much to pay attention to at once. She tried to just ignore it.

And that wasn't the only knew thing she was trying to ignore. She could... She could feel the other people on the ship, Mission and Zaalbar, Asyr and Carth, Kandosa, bright spots of warmth among cold emptiness, hot on her not-fingers, bright enough she could feel them from across the ship. Throwing off sparks by the hundreds, thoughts and feelings flying off of them into nothingness, too much, _far_ too much, it hurt to look at them too closely, emotion and memory not her own flooding her head. It made talking to any of them sort of tense and uncomfortable. Everyone except Shan anyway — she didn't throw off sparks at all, her warmth oddly shadowed — but talking to her had already been difficult for other reasons.

Or perhaps _they_ were uncomfortable with her now, not the other way around. She had just pulled magic powers out of nowhere. She could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

By the time she woke up, Mission had already been holed up in the com suite for a while. Tinkering with the ship's computer systems, as far as she could tell, she hadn't actually explained. Kandosa wasn't certain she'd spoken at all since they'd left Taris. The girl was slumped there in the single chair in the tiny room, reddened eyes fixed unblinkingly on the bank of screens in front of her, tapping away at the complicated-looking control panel. A meal pack sat at the edge of the board, had been there for some hours by the look of it, barely picked at.

More than she could see it, Cina could feel it. The sparks flying from her were heavy and dark, the air around her thick with shadows and fire. Mission was trying to distract herself, focus on something other than the obliteration of Taris, the murder of her whole world, everything she'd ever known. According to Kandosa, she hadn't even cried. She was pushing it away, but she couldn't do that forever, eventually it would feel real, and...

Cina wanted to help, but... What the fuck could she possibly say? Everyone Mission had ever known was likely dead — no words existed that could make that better. She had no idea what to do.

Her eyes turned to Zaalbar, sitting behind Mission, taking up the little available floorspace in the room. He had a gadget of some kind in his lap, half-disassembled, wires and circuit boards bared to the air. Whatever that was, he'd paused in his work, looking up at her.

She opened her mouth to speak, then cut off, glancing at Mission. She used RSL instead, Mission knew it so Zaalbar had probably picked it up at some point too. _Are you okay?_

Zaalbar's eye widened slightly. He set the whatever-it-was down in his lap, freeing his hands to talk. All the fur made it a little hard to make out the hand-shapes, but he was clearly used to working around that, emphasising harder and holding longer than would be expected. _I will be fine. Taris was not my world for true._ Good point — he hadn't been there nearly as long as Mission, and she'd gotten the impression she was the only person he really talked to anyway. _I am worried for her by one._

 _Me too. Find me if you need whatever?_

He blinked at her for a second — surprised? — before nodding. _Promise_.

Alright, then. Nodding back, Cina turned and walked into the main body of the ship.

When it came down to it, the _Ebon Hawk_ , the ship they'd managed to liberate from an Exchange crime lord, was a perfectly typical light freighter. Of course, "perfectly typical" meant someone had modded and tweaked the thing to their heart's content. Whoever Kang had doing his work had done a rather thorough job, Cina would be surprised if it even had any stock parts anymore.

It was a fairly ordinary light freighter at first glance, though with a few more luxuries than most. All the surfaces were done in gleaming black and gold, shimmering under blue argon lights — the effect was a bit more solemn than she'd expected, but pleasant all the same. Measuring at about twenty-five metres in every direction (best she could guess by sight), it had everything one would expect from a ship meant to ferry modest crew and cargo. The cockpit at the front (which Cina hadn't even set foot in), the com station just behind it, crew bunks to the front of the wings, larger and taller cargo holds toward the rear, the middle taken up with a wide, open space, seemingly a fusion of kitchen, mess, and workshop.

All typical, though rather unusual in the details. The beds were surprisingly comfortable, the plush lounges and sofas looked to be made of real leather, the kitchen was an actual _kitchen_ , not just the reprocessors that were all most people bothered with. (Which made her wonder why Mission had just been given a pre-prepped meal pack, but that didn't really matter right now.) There was some pretty serious tech sitting around, just the contents of that central room had to run millions of credits added up. The cargo bays were half-full of crate after crate, though they hadn't found a manifest, so they weren't sure exactly what all was in there. Kandosa was poking through them — he'd found a lot of food and replacement parts so far — but at the pace he was going the inventory would take a few days.

Cina was slightly surprised, walking into the central room, to find Asyr and Carth at the holotable, in the middle of a game of chess (or some variant, couldn't tell from here). She'd only left two minutes ago, they started up fast. To be honest, she was a little surprised they even knew how to play — it was a rather archaic game, only known in certain subcultures these days. She didn't have anything better to do at the moment, so she drifted over, took one of the empty seats.

Carth tensed with her presence, just noticeably, Cina's skin itching with his anxiety. And here she'd thought they'd gotten over his suspicion of her back on Taris. Silly her.

She should leave it be. She really should. They'd be landing on Dantooine tomorrow, and chances where she'd never see Carth again. As soon as he made contact with his superiors, he'd be recalled and reassigned somewhere — the galaxy was a big place, they'd be unlikely to run into each other if they didn't make a conscious effort to do so. But it just... Those side-eye glances just irritated her, okay. She _knew_ he was thinking something disapproving to himself, and that was _irritating_ , because she'd solved all his bloody problems for him, and he was looking at her like she might snap and kill them all or something.

She was _so_ tired of their shite — Carth, Shan, both of them.

"If you have a problem with me, Onasi, just come out and say it."

Her hand halfway across the board, Asyr froze, eyes flicking between the two of them. "Ah... Would you like me to leave the room?"

"That depends on him, I suppose."

He shot her a moody glare, shook his head. "It doesn't matter." Turning away, with every sense of dismissal, he made his move.

A move which happened to be a terrible tactical blunder — he was leaving his centre _far_ too vulnerable from the right — but he probably wouldn't appreciate Cina pointing that out. She was sure Asyr would take advantage of it anyway, he'd learn by getting his arse kicked. "It matters to me."

"Why should it?" He sounded oddly resentful saying that. Which was just confusing.

"Because you've suddenly reverted to watching me like I'm going to stab you in the back, and I have no idea why. It's annoying."

Asyr winced. Apparently, whatever Carth's problem was he'd told Asyr about it. She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms over her chest, settling in to wait for Carth to focus on the game again.

Because he had turned away, facing Cina with a hard, incredulous glare. "No idea? You have _no idea_ what you did?"

Glaring right back, Cina drawled, "I don't know, the only thing I remember doing to you lately is accomplishing _your mission_ with sparing little help from you. Maybe I should just not help you next time, if you're going to be an arse about it."

That didn't seem to make him any less angry with her. "It's _how_ you did it that's the problem."

"I know you thought my ideas were a little, well, insane, but—

"Not _that_. Hell," voice bouncing with a humourless laugh, "you don't even see what the problem is! It's nothing to you, is it, what you did to those men."

She frowned. "Which men?" Did he mean the ones she'd taken out with the plasma grenades? Sure, she'd killed a couple dozen people all at once, and the results had been a bit gruesome, but surely Carth had seen worse than that by now, he shouldn't be reacting this badly.

"The ones you crushed against the wall."

It took her a second to remember which he was talking about. She'd killed four people — three, technically, she was pretty sure one had already been hit — with Force magic nonsense, pushing them so hard bones had shattered and skin burst, covering the wall with blood and viscera. At least, that was the vague sense she had? Honestly, she barely remembered it. She was all but certain she hadn't even meant to do it at the time. Hadn't known she _could_ do it — it had been instinctual, she wasn't certain she'd be able to even lightly shove anything if she tried again now. "Oh. Er...so? I don't get it." Really, he'd seen her kill _far_ more than four people...

"I've fought with Jedi before, Cina," he said, voice dropped to a low, harsh hiss. "I've seen Sith fight before. What you did to those men, it..." Carth trailed off, turned to stare off to her right, eyes slightly unfocused.

Which was just...weird. She honestly couldn't see what was so bad about what she'd done. Those men would have died either way. If anything, killing them the way she had was a mercy. Unless the shots that took them were _very_ well-aimed, it'd take some long moments of agony for them to die, assuming they didn't live to be slowly crushed or cooked in the bombardment. What she'd done to them would have been virtually instant. They might not even have realised what was happening before it was over. It _had_ been messy, she guessed, but...

"You were Sith, weren't you? Before."

"I still don't remember any of it." Well, she had a few memories here and there, but they were broken and disjointed — the only ones she could really make sense of were from earlier in her life. "I asked Shan about it, though. I'm told I was a Jedi, until I joined the Revanchists and continued on into the Sith."

Asyr's eyes widened, stomach-shivering sparks bursting in the air. She thought that might be surprise (this mind-reading thing was fucking weird), which was odd, because with how Asyr had reacted earlier she'd clearly already known what Carth was going to say. Had she thought he was wrong? Eh, didn't really matter — Asyr relaxed a moment later, fixing her with a rather odd look, but not any more tense than she'd been a moment ago. It clearly didn't make much of a difference to her.

Carth, though, his face twisted with a scowl, eyes hot with anger. But it was more than that, something hard and sharp, like cold nails dragging across her skin, she couldn't quite suppress a shiver. (If she could remember how to turn off this Force empathy thing, that'd be great.) He might be trying to _look_ like he was angry, but Cina was pretty sure that was pain of some kind. Betrayal, maybe? "I should have known. You're just insane enough to be Sith."

Taken aback by the venom suddenly appearing in his voice, it took Cina a couple seconds to find her own. "That's funny, it wasn't that long ago you were saying I'm just insane enough to be a Jedi."

"Oh, cute. Nice to know you're taking this seriously."

"I think I'm being exactly as serious as this nonsense deserves."

Okay, that — heat pressing against her, like standing too close to a fire, hundreds of tiny insects pinching at her skin — _that_ was anger. "What, it doesn't even _matter_ to you? Empire, Republic, who cares?"

Cina shrugged. "I really don't remember anything, but I realise we were fighting on opposite sides of a war. I don't see why that should mean—"

"It's not about _opposite sides of_ —" Carth forced out a thick sigh, one hand coming up to run through his hair. "It's not so simple as _sides_ , Cina. The Sith, they're, they're... They're just _evil_."

It was probably only going to make him angrier, but it had already happened before she could even try to stop herself — Cina rolled her eyes. That pinching heat _did_ get worse, Cina spoke before he could say something likely inane. "Oh, _honestly_ , Carth, are you a bloody child? That's what societies at war _always_ say: the other side is cruel and depraved, we are good and virtuous. Every time, it's perfectly predictable. _The Sith are evil_ , I mean, really, you realise there are _tens of trillions_ of beings in the Empire? Shite, probably _hundreds_. And they're all evil, are they? I'm sure."

"I don't mean all the ordinary beings trapped under their heel—"

"Under whose heel? You do realise the Empire is a syndical democracy?"

" _Hjanethe_ , you're showing your Imperial bias." That faint expression on Asyr's face, as hard to read as Bothans could be, looked like amusement. Through the weird synesthetic empathy thing Cina was trying to get used to, it felt more ambiguous, oddly...she didn't know, twitchy? Not entirely sure how to read that. "The Republic and the Empire use the word differently. When the Empire says 'Sith', it's a general term applied to all of their citizens. The Republic just uses it for their Jedi, and sometimes their military."

"Oh." Cina hadn't noticed that. That was, just, sort of silly, wasn't it? The Sith had been a single species, originally, the same term eventually extending to cover the whole of their multiracial society. Restricting the word to a much smaller organisation, who were and always had been a tiny minority was just...well, "silly" really was the best word for it.

His glare narrowing on Asyr now, Carth bit out, "Those monsters aren't Jedi."

Asyr's brow twitched, that tickling sense of amusement running along Cina's spine intensifying. "They have inexplicable magic powers and run about waving around lightsabers. Scan like Jedi to me."

"The Sith actually inherited the use of lightsabers from the Jedi," Cina said, almost without even meaning to. "A splinter sect of the Jedi, exiled from the Republic about three thousand years ago, stumbled across the Sith homeworld. The old Sith had their native traditions, of course, but the Jedi and the Sith seem so similar for a reason — they have common heritage. Of course, the most visible of the modern Sith were trained by the Order in the first place, so..."

With another burst of amusement, Asyr rumbled, "Thank you, Professor."

"Shush, you."

Carth clearly didn't think appreciate their joking around. His eyes only more venomous than they'd been a moment ago — though, for the moment, still focused on Asyr — he said, in something more like a low growl than a proper human voice, "I just can't believe you don't care at all. If it makes no difference to you, why are you fighting with us at all?"

"Obviously, it _does_ make a difference to us." One of Asyr's shoulders rose in a languid shrug. (An imitated human gesture, Bothans didn't do that amongst themselves.) "I can't tell you why we decided to ally with you — I'm not privy to Council meetings. I know for a fact that the Empire offered an alliance as well, but we chose the Republic in the end. We must have thought fighting with you was in the best interests of the Bothan people. I don't know what that interest is, but I trust it is so.

"We don't see this as the black-and-white moral conflict you do. It is a war, and all wars are the same when you get down to it. Perhaps, since it is less personal to us, it is simply easier for us to see both Republic and Empire as they are."

"This isn't like other wars. The Sith have to be stopped."

"So every nation has always said of its foes."

"Other people don't _kill whole planets!"_

Asyr sniffed. "We're just forgetting the Kiirium Reaches ever existed, then."

That actually managed to break Carth's anger, if only for a moment. Blinking in mute confusion, he managed only, "The what?"

"You want to take this one, Professor?"

"I suppose I could." Cina tried not to smile — that would only make Carth annoyed again. "You probably know the Hutts fought a vicious defensive war against the Tionese over twenty thousand years ago. Some generations later, when the Tionese first made contact with the young Republic, the Hutts feared the two human-dominated powers would unite against them. So, in preparation for an invasion that never came, the Hutts attacked the Kiirium Reaches, along their border with the Tionese. The entire human population of every single one of those planets was annihilated with fission bombs and destroyed the hyperspace beacons, which were still necessary for interstellar travel at the time, reducing the entire area to an inhospitable, unnavigable wasteland. We don't know exactly how many Tionese-settled worlds there were in the region, but it had to be dozens."

In an overly casual drawl, Asyr said, "I'm not surprised it's not mentioned in the standard Republic history curriculum. It was so very long ago, and the Perlemian War followed soon after. Not to mention, the Kiirium Reaches were on the far rim, outside of the Republic and settled by enemies — why should your Republic care?"

"I'm from the rim, you know," Carth said through grit teeth.

"Yes, but you don't decide what history is taught in Republic schools."

Carth forced out a low grunt, as though reluctantly acknowledging the point. "I'm not saying the Sith have a monopoly on evil. The Hutts aren't as bad, but they're not far from it."

This time, the derisive laugh burst past Cina's lips before she could stop it. Carth turned a glare on her, but she managed to get control of herself before he could start yelling at her. "I'm sorry, Carth, but are you trying to suggest the Republic has _never_ done anything equally as monstrous? I mean, even just speaking of the Tionese, do you remember how the Perlemian War actually ended? The Tionese offered an unconditional surrender. The Republic refused to accept it. Instead, they parked their fleet over Deservo, which was the Tionese capitol at the time, and _levelled the entire planet_. The death toll is estimated to be _over forty billion_ , most of them innocent civilians. Twenty thousand years later, and Deservo has _still_ never fully recovered, it remains a sparsely-developed ruin to this day.

"And that's hardly the last time the Republic did something reprehensible. The Coruscanti bombardment of Alsakan in the eleventh millennium killed billions and devastated the environment, it took a century of terraforming before the world was habitable again. The settlement of the rim is replete with innumerous atrocities — exterminations and enslavements of native civilisations, mostly. To this day, Republic owned and operated corporations _still_ enslave billions on the rim. And, let's not forget the Pius Dea Crusades, a thousand years of constant war fought with the _explicit intent_ of genocide. No, the Republic is hardly so noble and innocent as you pretend."

"What, because the Republic did something bad ten thousand years ago, it's perfectly fine if the Sith do the same thing now?"

Under her breath, Asyr started hissing in her native language. Curses often weren't directly translatable, but the general feel of it was about typical humans being self-righteous idiots. Not surprising, seeing as how the Bothans successfully managed to beat back assaults by the Pius Dea Republic multiple times, though not without losses. Losses deep enough the scars were still visible throughout much of their culture, thousands of years later — the Bothans hadn't been nearly so militant of a people as they were now before the Crusades had forced them to adapt to survive, and the war remained the primary reason they'd never actually joined the Republic.

Cina shrugged. "Seven thousand years ago, actually, and the Crusades were _far_ worse than anything the Sith have done. Just ask the Dalinar, or the Teirasan, or the Marshak, or the Kwenni, or the Namlhta, or the Dras — oh wait, you can't, they don't exist anymore. But no, that's not what I'm saying. You're the one picking sides. I don't have any stake in this one way or the other."

"You _were_ a Sith!"

"So Shan tells me. But I don't see what that has to do anything, it's not like I remember it. Honestly, I don't see why I should care which one comes out on top. I mean, you were just on a Sith planet — did daily life for average people really seem that different to you? Taris is a border world, and one with its own problems at that, but you can't honestly say it was any better under the Republic."

"They're all being murdered _right this second!"_

"Well, yes, but I'd bet you anything Alek ordered that. Everybody knows he's a homicidal maniac. They—"

"Malak."

Cina blinked at the interruption, raised an eyebrow at Asyr. "What?"

"You're showing your Imperial bias again. The Republic still uses his pseudonym from the Mandalorian War."

"Ah. I'm going to keep using his real name, thanks — 'Malak' just sounds silly. Anyway," she said, turning back to Carth, "as I was saying, they have lunatics like Alek, or Cariaga, or Talvon, or Voren, but they also have people like Nisotsa, Saul, Sesai, Yenish, Harna— Okay, what now?"

Asyr was chuckling, a low, harsh rumble, the tickling running across Cina's skin so strong it was distracting. "I'm sorry, but, do you even realize you're calling all these infamous Sith by their first names?"

The only answer Cina had for that was an exasperated roll of her eyes.

Carth entirely ignored the byplay. Frowning so hard his brow almost appeared physically thicker, eyes so intense they almost burned, he growled, "If you can think _Saul Karath_ is a good man, you really are insane."

"Ah..." When it came down to it, Cina couldn't think of why she had such a positive opinion of Admiral Karath — all she knew of him was from Republic propaganda, cast as a hero in one war and a villain in the next. "Well, he does have something of a noble reputation, doesn't he?"

His glare only grew hotter, Cina's skin itched with it. "Maybe he did, before he murdered _my entire homeworld_."

She blinked. That sort of explained a lot — Carth did seem to be making this whole Sith thing strangely personal. If he was from Telos, well, she couldn't exactly blame him for being irrational about the Sith, could she? "Alek is responsible for Telos."

"What difference does _that_ make?!"

Her mouth opened to answer, but she stopped, let it slowly fall closed again. No institution, especially one as complex as an interstellar government, was monolithic. They were composed of individual beings, with individual motives and interests. From an internal perspective, which faction was involved in specific endeavours, even which individual, that could become critically important. It could make _all_ the difference.

( _She could kill him for this. She_ should _kill him for this—_ )

But to someone on the outside? What did such internal distinctions look like to them? Were they even visible at all? After a brief, uncomfortable silence, Cina finally said, "I suppose it doesn't. Just as it wouldn't make a difference to you if I said I'm all but positive I was one of Revan's people."

His lip curling, as though he'd just bit into something intolerably bitter, Carth slowly shook his head. "They're both traitors and murderers."

"As they are, so am I, and so I'll always be to you. So I guess we have nothing more to say to each other."

"No, I guess we don't." Shoving himself up to his feet, Carth flicked his king, the illusory game piece tipping over. "You were going to win, anyway." Then he stalked away, stomping off toward the right-side crew bunks.

Well. That could have gone better.

Somewhat reluctantly, Cina turned a questioning look back on Asyr. Switching languages, as she usually did when they were alone, she said, "We're not going to have a problem now, are we?"

Asyr let out a short, amused huff. "I fail to see why I should be angry with you for circumstances you have no control over and do not remember."

"I shouldn't think so, but there went Carth."

"The Captain is a loyal soldier." Asyr said it flatly, with a note of finality, as though that explained everything one might want to know, and there was no need to discuss it any further. Which, in a way, it did, and there wasn't. "Since I didn't get my game out of Onasi?"

Cina frowned down at the game board. It was very vague, far at the back of her head, too fuzzy to get a clear image, but a few impressions floated to the surface. A dusty room cast with slanted evening sunlight, the twining smells of exotic tisanes and tangy pastries, smooth ceramic against her fingers, a lined, laughing face framed with curling silver hair — _Yuse_ , that was his name, her great-uncle Yuse. "Are you sure about that? I have a feeling I'm quite good."

"Let's find out, shall we?"

By the time dinner came around, they'd discovered "quite good" was something of an understatement.

* * *

"Shan, can I ask you something?"

While she did still tense at the sound of Cina's voice, she relaxed significantly quicker than she had before. At least, so long as Asyr wasn't around — Shan had stormed off to sleep in the common room last night, but not before making it _very_ clear she didn't approve. Which had just been irritating. What Cina and Asyr might or might not got up to with each other was absolutely none of the snobby Jedi's business.

Not that Cina had complained about her leaving — with Mission still holed up in the coms station with Zaalbar she and Asyr had had the room to themselves.

When Shan turned to face her, her brow was just slightly lowered with irritation, as though she knew exactly what Cina had just been thinking. "What is it?"

"Do you feel that?"

The frown deepened slightly. "Feel what?"

"I don't know." She didn't really remember how this Force... This sixth-sense thing was very confusing, she guessed. She knew she _should_ be able to control it, she just didn't remember how. Which essentially meant she'd regressed to the skills she'd had as a child — she had a vague feeling she'd always had this, but the Jedi had taught her how to control it. She didn't remember how to turn it off, nor how to focus it on a particular thing. It was just... _there_ , like a thousand hands constantly touching everything around her.

Which could be rather disorienting at times, but not all bad — Asyr naked was rather more interesting now, for one thing.

"I think..." Cina trailed off, trying to figure out exactly what she thought. It was such a vague feeling she'd been getting, she wasn't even entirely certain it was there at all, she didn't know how to... "Do you... Do you ever have the feeling we're not alone on this ship?"

Shan stared at her for a moment, still and heavy. "I have not felt anything of the like. But you have?"

"I don't know. I just..." Cina had no idea. It was so subtle, like a distant echo hardly heard, quiet enough to suspect she'd never heard it at all. She'd only bothered asking Shan at all because she couldn't figure it out herself. "I don't know. Maybe I'm just imagining it."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. If the Force is trying to speak to you, it would be unwise to ignore it."

 _That_ was completely unhelpful. As usual.

Cina hadn't even had time to put the issue completely out of mind when it was whispering at her again. On the way toward the right-side cargo bay, where she was certain she could find Kandosa tinkering away, she jerked to a halt in the middle of the kitchen as something passed by her. Not something she could see, certainly, and not really anything she could feel either. It was as a breath of wind, weak, hardly strong enough to pick at a couple hairs, but not a physical wind, something more... She didn't know, she didn't have the language for this weird Force stuff. _Something_ had just been there, anyway.

No, not some _thing_. Some _one_. She was sure of it now. She couldn't say how, but she knew. There was someone else here. Someone who'd remained perfectly hidden for a full day, even from a Jedi.

That...was unsettling.

Acting more on instinct than any real thought, Cina shuffled into motion, drifting across the common room. She followed the faintest scent on the air — though it wasn't a scent, really. More a subtle charge, the taste of a storm about to strike, lightning withheld, but thin, so thin, almost too little to follow. Cina thought she'd lost it more than once, but she kept finding it again, a bare thread drawing her deeper into the ship, further, step by step.

Into the left-side cargo bay. It led her between the towers of crates, down one row, across a column, then down another row...then back to the first one. She hadn't gotten lost, if anything she was getting closer, her quarry trying to lose her. And she was frightened now, this mystery person she was following. She felt it as phantom ice sliding against her spine, pins prickling at her skin, and she was closer now, whoever it was had nowhere to go, they both knew it.

When that something came again, not-wind brushing past her face, Cina's hand snapped out down and to her right without thought. It landed on something solid, the contact drawing the hidden person out into the light.

Cina frowned — it was a little girl. She couldn't be older than ten, if she was even that old, dressed in dirty tatters, grease smeared all over her skin, matted hair so filthy Cina couldn't be certain what colour it was supposed to be. Her legs and arms were scrawny, covered in nicks and scratches, thin enough Cina could make out every contour of the bones of her bare feet and ankles.

And she was so _bright_. Standing next to her was like standing too close to a furnace, looking too directly into a sun, but it didn't _hurt_ , exactly. The effect was more like, like having too much caf in one sitting, the light making her twitchy, almost giddy. It was hard to believe, now, that neither she nor Shan had noticed _this_ had been on the ship the whole time.

Of course, the girl's fear also exploded across her at the same time the rest did — that was _far_ less pleasant, sharp and hot and nauseating. The girl screamed and flailed, tried to pull away from Cina, slapping at her arm. "No, don't — I'm sorry, I didn't mean — let me _go_ , no—"

Cina snapped out of it in a couple seconds, tearing her metaphorical eyes away from what she instinctively knew was the girl's...whatever it was called. Jedi magic shite, all that, whatever. She lifted her hand away from the girl's shoulder, lifted them both up, palm-out. "I'm not going to hurt you. It's okay." It was only after she spoke that Cina realised the girl had been yelling in Mandoa.

The girl did stop yelling — instantly, like someone had hit her pause button — but she didn't seem to actually believe Cina. She had her back pressed against a nearby crate, bright green eyes fixed solidly on Cina's, still and sharp and unmoving. Waiting.

Forcing her voice low and gentle, the Mandoa sounding almost musical, Cina said, "You are very clever, to hide here so long. My name is Cina. What is yours?"

Her eyes narrowed into a suspicious glare. She searched Cina's face for something over long seconds, before finally deciding to answer. "Vesaise of Sulem."

Cina held back the urge to frown, not wanting to scare the girl any further. At the end of the War, Revan — who, having defeated the Mandalor in a formal duel, had technically been the new (interim) Mandalor — had ordered the clans to disperse, sending Mandoade society into a disorganised galaxy-wide diaspora. It hadn't gone perfectly smoothly: the Sulem, one of the more powerful clans of Jakelia, had been drawn into a running battle with a few of their traditional rivals. By the end, the Sulem had been a broken shadow of their former selves, limping out into obscurity in the wider galaxy.

Where exactly had she learned all this shite about Mandoade anyway? Okay, during the war, she guessed, but really...

The point was, she wouldn't expect to find a Sulem hidden away in a crime lord's personal ship. And by the look of her, she'd been here for some time. "It's an honour to stand with you, Sasha."

The girl twitched, some of the tension leaking out of her. She didn't say anything, just stared up at Cina with a crooked, peculiar sort of look on her face. Probably at the overly formal greeting she'd just used, which would never ordinarily be used with a child. Or maybe it was the improvised nickname — Mission would certainly make her own anyway — could be either one.

"How long have you been in here?"

Sasha stared at her for another long, tense moment. "I dunno."

"You don't know?"

"I was counting days, at first. But I was doing it by marking a box, and they moved it away, so I stopped." Talking that much at once, it was far more obvious she hadn't spoken in quite a while, her voice shaky and hoarse.

"How high did you count?"

"Two hundred fifty-nine."

Cina imagined the little girl counting up tally marks stitching across the inside of a crate, and felt her stomach twist. "How long ago was that?"

"Long. Less than before the box was gone, maybe, but long."

So she'd been on this ship, hiding away from slavers and murderers, living off of whatever she could steal, for probably a year and maybe more. That... Well, she was incredibly lucky she'd never been found, even to be alive. "How did you get here?"

"I hid."

Cina almost laughed at the flat delivery of the uninformative answer. But she held it in, because she had the feeling the full story was less than amusing. "Well, you don't have to hide anymore, Sasha. We stole this ship from the scumbags who had it before. We're not like them, none of us are going to hurt you. I can help you find your family again, if you like."

"They're dead." Sasha's face didn't even twitch.

Yeah, she'd thought they might be. "We'll figure something out, then. Right now—"

"What are you doing talking to yourself back here?"

With the smallest yelp of surprise, Sasha vanished. Instantly, without a trace, as though she'd never existed at all.

Even as Kandosa rounded the corner of the row, Cina met him with a glare. "Honestly, Kandosa, can your timing be any worse? The girl's terrified enough without a huge bloody warrior showing up out of nowhere."

Kandosa's scarred eyebrow ticked up his forehead. Matching her glare with a heavy, cold one of his own, he grumbled, "What girl?"

"Kang had a Mandoade stowaway. She's been doing Jedi things to hide on the ship for a year or more." Amusingly, 'do Jedi things' really was the best way there was to say it in Mandoa.

"You're fucking with me."

"That would make things simpler, wouldn't it?" Raising her voice a little, throwing it back into the softer register she'd been using a minute ago, "It's okay, Sasha. This is Kandosa of Ordo, he's a friend of mine. I know he looks hard as steel, but he's soft as spongecake on the inside."

Kandosa scowled. "I never should have made that joke. You'll never stop punishing me for it, will you?"

"That doesn't seem likely."

Faintly, from somewhere above her and to her left, Sasha's thin voice said, "I saw him." Kandosa jumped, wide eyes casting all around the room, even straight over their heads, trying to find her — apparently, he hadn't taken Cina's word for it. "He fights with the Ken."

Kandosa put that together more quickly than she did. "I don't work for that traitorous coward anymore. Cina here helped me kill him and take his ship. She cut him in half, it was hilarious."

Cina wasn't entirely sure if she should consider that a compliment or not. She _certainly_ didn't see what was so funny about it — it'd been sort of anticlimactic, really.

There was another of Sasha's long, eerie silences. "Did she get Calo too?"

"Calo?"

"That was the other idiot you sliced up. Yeah, kid, Calo's dead too."

A few thin giggles bounced down from somewhere near the top of one of the stacks of crates. " _Good_."

For some inexplicable reason, Kandosa actually _smiled_ at that, his eyes going uncharacteristically bright. Mandoade. "That shithead do something to piss you off?"

"He killed my mother," Sasha whispered, soft and cold. "And my uncles. And my brother. He took my sister, and took her to the Ken. I could hear them." She paused, for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was lower, at floor level behind Cina. "It's good he's dead."

For a few long seconds, Cina and Kandosa just silently stared at each other.

Finally, he muttered, "Have I ever mentioned how much I hated those Exchange slugs?"

Cina shrugged. "It's come up. I kind of regret that these two died so quickly now."

"Yeah, for some people a lasersword—" She held back a guffaw at the Mandoa portmanteau. "—is far too easy a way to go."

"It is a Jedi weapon, they are pansies like that."

"Yeah, no wonder you left."

She just smirked back — she had a feeling wanting to make people who deserved it suffer was actually rather low on the list of reasons she'd left the Jedi, but there was no need to linger on the point. "Right, then." Cina turned to look behind her. At some point Sasha had reappeared, standing a few steps away. There was a peculiar, curious sort of look on her face, bright eyes flicking between Cina and Kandosa. Trying to figure them out, she would guess. "Let's get you cleaned up, Sasha. I don't think we have any clothes that'll fit you though, we'll figure it out."

Kandosa snorted. "'We'? You're the one pulling mysterious children out of thin air. This looks like your problem to me."

"Fuck you, Kandosa."

He gave her a crooked grin, turned to walk away. Before slipping out of sight, he called over his shoulder, "Sure, you know where to find me."

Despite herself, Cina couldn't hold in a chuckle. Mandoade, honestly...

* * *

The disorganised chaos of hyperspace stuttered, like the framerate of a video abruptly dropping. Starting at a point directly ahead, spots of black opened up, extending to streak back around them, starting as narrow belts but quickly expanding, until the black was all there was, the only remnants of light tiny, static dots of white and blue and red.

The largest, brightest object in the sky was Dantooine itself. Asyr had plotted a safe, conservative course, placing them far enough away the planet only filled roughly half of the view, the curving arc of the day side brilliant against stellar night, the distant sun setting the brilliant white clouds painfully afire. From this distance, Dantooine appeared to be an ordinary CL-class world, if exceptionally undeveloped. Cina spotted great plains coloured yellowish-brown about the equator, the vegetation transitioning into a peculiar soft purple in the temperate belts, along the ocean shores and in a few places inland around lakes, in thin lines around rivers invisible from this distance, a muddy greenish-brownish colour, presumably forests of some kind. The seas were a deep, vibrant blue, a band of a lighter shade extending a finger's width above the horizon, without a hint of industrial haze. The planet looked virtually untouched, the native vegetation unbroken by urban development, no scars from industrial-scale mining, a world left untouched by the greater galaxy.

" _Not untouched. Forgotten."_

Her vision going fuzzy, colours and shapes blurring together, Cina's head swam, sending her first teetering against the back of Mission's chair, then to her knees, a rush of roaring black crashing over—

" _The Dark Side is powerful in this place." It was a man's voice, coming thin and faded, as though from far away, his partially-suppressed rim drawl touched with mixed awe and unease._

" _That's not darkness." This was a woman's, equally faded, the slightest hint of eager fascination brightening her meticulous, cultured core accent. "This place is very old, it remembers. That's mourning you feel."_

" _Are you sure you know what you're doing? The ancient Jedi must have sealed this all away for a reason."_

" _You're still too willing to take their good intentions on faith."_

 _The woman reached out, not with a hand but something more intangible, yet all the more real for it. Something reached back, a blazing arch cast in life and intent etched into stone and steel, the land around them shuddering with sleeping potential, vestigial fingers reaching out for the stars._

" _Besides, the Jedi didn't seal this, the Builders did."_

" _It's not too late, you know." Pleadingly but, affection frustrated, with no expectation to be affirmed. "Sami, we don't have to do this. We can still go away."_

" _We talked about this." Exasperation, resentment, impatience, affection strained. "You're not going to change my mind by pestering me about it."_

" _You can't blame a guy for trying."_

 _Teasingly, sardonically, "I think you'll find, Alek, that I can do whatever I like."_

 _The arch shivered, it sang, ancient symbols from a forgotten language flared, and the seam split, death and light and endless time spilling out into the Dantooine night._

With a sudden jolt, hard enough a groan jerked its way up her throat, Cina was released, leaving her shivering against the metal floor. Her vision was still blurred, her ears filled with a fuzzy warbling, but she knew, somehow, she was back in the cockpit of the _Ebon Hawk_ , Mission and Zaalbar crouching over her, the air thick with voices raised in confusion and panic.

Also? Her head _really_ fucking hurt.

Thankfully, she recovered quickly, in a few seconds coming back to herself enough she could sit up, with a little assistance from Mission, propped up against the wall under the main systems board. Even that much had her feeling hot and shaky, but that faded in a few seconds, strength gradually returning. "No, I don't have any idea what that was," she said, to a question from Mission she'd only heard the tail half of, her own voice sounding hoarse and unsteady to her own ears.

"A vision." Shan's voice sounded oddly weak too, a quick peek around the nearest seat showed the Jedi was looking exceptionally pale, a sheen of sweat across her forehead. Her eyes were a little out of focus, staring at nothing, hand kneading the side of her head. "Though a rather...unusual one. I cannot be entirely certain what, as it was too indistinct, but after the war Revan and Malak did something here that left an echo, of sorts."

Under the hot pounding that hadn't gotten much better, a peculiar tingle swept through her head. "You saw it too."

"Yes."

"Is that...normal? For two people to get the same vision at the same time?"

Shan went peculiarly still. For a long moment, she stared unblinkingly off into the middle distance, silently mulling over something — long enough Cina wasn't certain she would answer at all. Finally, "No, that is not normal."

Cina frowned. Shan really was bloody transparent — she wasn't telling her something, something important. Confronting her on it now wouldn't accomplish anything, so Cina made a quick mental note to research simultaneous visions at some point. That...was a thing she would be _able_ to research, right? The Jedi down there would certainly have a library, and if anyone were to have anything on such an esoteric topic it would be them. That felt like a reasonable thing to believe, so, yes, that was probably correct.

She was starting to get the hang of this suppressed Jedi instincts thing, but it still felt very strange.

There was a click and a hiss, startling her enough she twitched, a voice slightly distorted by compression artifacts ringing through the cockpit. " _Dinar Control to Imperial shuttle four-dorn mark cresh-four-nine-set: state your business in this system immediately or be determined hostile."_

"Shit! The transponder! Sorry!" Mission jumped up to her feet, reached for one of the panels over Cina's head. Muttering a fluid stream of Huttese curses under her breath, she pulled the panel open, started fiddling with the innards of one system or another.

Her voice a low growl, Asyr said, "Any second now would be good, Mission."

"Just a second, I almost— There!" The panel clanged closed again, Mission's fingers typing in a command and flipping a couple switches so quickly Cina could hardly follow it. "Done."

"Good work." Asyr might not be very friendly, but at least she knew how to give praise when it was deserved — hacking the standard transponder signal was difficult enough, but setting up a system that could switch codes that quickly was a neat trick. (Take notes, Shan.) "Sorry about that, Control, we were just running a Sith blockade a couple days ago. Forgot to take the mask off."

Cina snorted — a transponder mask was far, far simpler than what Mission had actually done, but it was also far less illegal. Still illegal, of course, just a minor enough of an offense undeveloped rim worlds like Dantooine were unlikely to have any local authority who would make a fuss about it.

There was a short pause, Control sounding particularly unamused when he came back. " _Forgive me if I'm hesitant to take your word for it,_ Ebon Hawk."

In her native language, Asyr muttered something that roughly translated to, "Idiot bureaucrat, I'll rip your proud tongue out if you don't roll over."

Cina snorted. "That might be hard to do from here."

"Allow me my fantasy, _Hjanethe_." Flicking the com back on, Asyr continued in Basic. "Control, my name is Asyr Lar'sym, a commissioned officer with Bothaw Combined. My copilot is Captain Carth Onasi, whom I'm certain you've heard of. Shoot us down, if you like, but you might find yourself the target of considerably uncomfortable questions in the coming days."

" _Uuuhhhhhh..."_

Wow, _that's_ professional. Frontier planets, sometimes...

Before this farce could go on any longer, Shan pushed herself to her feet, leaning between Carth and Asyr to loom over the coms panel. "This is Jedi Bastila Shan. Forgive the confusion, Control, we've had a complicated trip. The Council already knows we're here — we'll be landing outside Dinar Enai."

" _Oh, uh, of course, Master Jedi. Sorry. Uh. Thank you."_ The channel closed with a soft squelch.

"I think you made the kid nervous," Cina muttered. Not that that was entirely surprising — she might be rather young yet, but Shan had already managed to make herself a household name throughout the Republic.

Shan, though, assumed Cina was mocking her, and shot her a light glare. Couldn't blame her for that either, really.

The flight down to the surface was exceptionally smooth, Carth guiding the _Hawk_ into the atmosphere as soft and light as a feather. By the time Cina felt steady enough to stand again, they were already only a few moments from landing, the viewport dominated by a sky turned pink and yellow from approaching sunset, rolling hills thick with long, waving grasses cast yellow and orange by the fading light. There was nothing but grass, for miles and miles, broken here and there by protruding granite, an occasional twisted, spiky tree. Pretty, but plain.

Even as the dull, blocky shapes of artificial structures started breaking over the horizon, a cold shiver ran up Cina's spine. Unbidden, her eyes turned to the side, staring at the metal of the cockpit a half metre from her face. But not seeing it, looking further, kilometres away, drawn to something she knew but could not see.

Somehow, she knew _exactly_ where Lesami and Alek had gone.

As far as towns went, Dinar Enai was a rather pathetic example of one. A modest collection of little buildings formed of native stone, a ring of newer ones along the edge simple prefabs, Cina doubted it covered even a kilometre square. The largest feature was the Jedi complex itself, a permacrete building with multiple wings and a couple low towers, the whole thing composed of soft, curving lines, a sizeable courtyard cut out in the centre, surrounded by walkpaths and gardens. The rest of the town was only slightly larger, mostly humble houses, by the look of it a handful of stores and basic workshops.

The town was small enough it didn't even have a proper landing pad — a small collection of craft were clumped at the southeast fringe, near a small com tower and what looked like the crowns of industrial fuel pumps, the structure mostly buried. Carth just picked a patch of grass, no different than any other, and came to a gentle landing, the rocky soil firm enough to support the _Hawk_ 's weight.

They'd barely been on the ground for a minute before Shan was heading out, saying something about needing to report to the Council. On the way she gave Cina a lingering, anxious look, which she supposed was supposed to be subtle — Cina had the feeling she would feature heavily in that report. The rest of them gathered around the holotable, sitting in uncomfortable silence. Mission and Zaalbar were already fiddling away at their own projects, as they were almost every minute of every day, and by the look of it Carth and Asyr were working on tracking down the first shuttle that would get them back to civilisation.

Cina watched them all for a moment, wondering if she should be saying anything to any of them. She didn't _think_ there was anything important she needed to be dealing with right now. Actually, there _was_ one thing. Cina pulled out a datapad, queried the town's network for a directory. Not surprisingly, Cina hadn't found anything suitable on board for Sasha to wear — there _were_ changes of clothes stashed away, but Carth was the only one any of them would actually fit.

She had managed to get Sasha cleaned up, not that that had gone very easily at all. Tempting her out of the cargo hold to the fresher had been difficult enough, the skittish girl disappearing (literally) at any unexpected noise or quick movement, but convincing her to take off her rags and get in the tub had taken even longer. (There actually was an oversized bathtub, with massage jets and everything, which was just absurd for a ship this size, but Kang had liked his luxuries.) Talking Sasha into it had proven to be simply impossible, and Cina knew without having to try that physically directing her would be a _bad_ idea. In the end, Cina had undressed and gotten in first, but even then Sasha hadn't even started following for another five minutes, still temporarily vanishing from view every time Cina even slightly startled her.

It had become clear rather quickly that Sasha's hair was simply unrecoverable — she'd had to just cut most of it off. That hadn't been easy either, the traumatised girl reacting with predictable terror to Cina approaching her with something sharp. It'd taken quite a bit of convincing for Sasha to let her come close enough. Actually, once again, the _talking_ hadn't done much good at all, she'd only managed it by leaving a knife out for Sasha to take and hold on to.

This kid was _seriously_ messed up. It was impossible to _not_ notice, but Cina tried to avoid thinking about it anyway.

She'd just picked the clothing store in town that sounded more promising (there were only two), when Kandosa walked into the room. "Right. This was fun. Everybody off my ship."

There was a bit of grumbling at that, mostly from Carth and Zaalbar, and a bit of shouting, entirely from Mission. Smiling to herself, Cina waited for it to die down a bit before cutting over her in Mandoa. " _Your_ ship? I don't see that this is _your_ ship, Kandosa. You couldn't have taken it without our help. You had the idea, but I did most of the killing, and Mission did all the tech work."

Her face coming closer to her familiar grin than it had in the last couple days, Mission yelled, "Yeah! What she said!"

Kandosa's lips twitched with what looked like an involuntary smile, just for an instant before he ruthlessly suppressed it, spearing Mission with a doubtful glare. "I know you don't speak Mandoa, _ad'ika_. You have no idea what she just said."

"Well, no, but I heard my name, so I assume she's saying we get to stay. Right?"

It could be her imagination, as stony as he could make himself, but Cina was pretty sure Kandosa was suppressing another expression far too soft for his reputation. Mission _was_ adorable. Cina had to hide her own mocking smirk, that wouldn't make him any more agreeable. "Actually, I was saying this ship is just as much ours as his — arguably more, depending how you look at it."

"Oh, that, what she said, that's way better."

"You're welcome, Mission. On top of that," Cina said, turning back to Kandosa, "there's our little stowaway I found in the cargo hold. I distinctly recall you saying she's my problem. Well, I can't exactly take care of _my problem_ if I'm not around, can I?"

Kandosa scowled. "I could always kick her off with you."

With a low snort of laughter, Cina said, "Good luck. I can hardly convince her to take ten steps out of that one damn room. And you can't _force_ her out — if she doesn't want you to find her, you never will. Shan didn't even notice she was there."

"I could just leave her there. She doesn't get in the way."

"Like you would actually leave an orphaned Mandoade girl to rot alone."

Kandosa's scowl turned venomous.

"Look, how about this." Cina turned back to her datapad, in a few seconds had open the node for SRS's transfer service. A bit of fiddling, and she'd set up a weekly payment from her inexplicable fortune to the same private account Kandosa had had her pay into for his help on the rescue mission. "There. I presume you will find that acceptable."

For a few seconds, he stared at her in impassive confusion, before he started at a low beep — moving slowly, giving her a narrow-eyed look of suspicion, he pulled out his own pad. He stared at it for some seconds before finding his voice. "This is..."

Cina switched back to Mandoa. "A hundred thousand credits a week, yes."

He glanced up, blankly stared at her for long seconds. "And you realise this is five times what Davik was paying me." His voice came low, slow, sounding absolutely flabbergasted.

"Really? I didn't know that, actually. No wonder you were looking for outside work — that's _far_ less than you're worth."

Face splitting with a toothy grin, Kandosa barked out a shocked laugh. "Woman, you're nuts, but you're my kind of nuts."

With a prim little smile, she said, "I suppose I'm meant to take that as a compliment." The overly-proper, dignified sort of tone she was trying for sounded plain _strange_ in Mandoa.

"If you like." Still chuckling to himself, Kandosa started across the room; Cina pushed herself to her feet to meet him. Roughly clasping her forearm, he said in Basic (presumably for Mission's benefit), "We've got us a deal, Boss. But, if your credit dries up, we're going to have to continue our talk about the ship."

Cina nodded. "Understood." She really didn't think it'd be a problem — she _had_ been able to withdraw twenty million credits all at once without any snags, if her account permissions allowed that a hundred thousand a week should be _no_ problem at all.

Now that that was taken care of, Cina set off on her little errand. She made a token attempt at getting Sasha to come with her, but, predictably, that hardly went anywhere, the girl wouldn't even come as far as the ramp. Which, that was fine, her participation wasn't strictly necessary — Cina was pretty sure she could guess her size well enough by sight. She took a last lingering look at Mission on the way out, just in case. To prevent any possible snags, they'd been carrying only the necessities with them, so Mission and Zaalbar had been forced to leave virtually everything they owned behind. Cina had the feeling she didn't care about this sort of thing too much — since they'd met a couple weeks ago now, she'd only ever seen Mission wearing that one outfit — but if something jumped out at her, why not.

Though, buying clothes off the rack was probably very hit and miss for Twi'leks — their bone structure was different enough from humans' that the proportions would be wrong, and those lekku might make getting a lot of things on...awkward. Come to think of it, how did Mission even get that shirt over her head? The collar was clearly seamless all the way around, and it was hard to tell just looking but the fabric didn't seem very stretchy at all. Eh, not important.

Dinar Enai, as she was pretty sure she'd heard it called, was a simple, sleepy little town. This time of the evening, there was hardly anyone about, Cina virtually alone on the narrow, winding concrete roads. It was only a short walk to the clothing store she'd marked, where she found herself the only customer — the young human woman at the counter looked inordinately pleased to have anyone coming in at all. It was a tiny, simple place, quite utilitarian in their selection, really just the basic necessities.

But Sasha did need the basic necessities, so that wasn't a problem. Though, guessing exactly what the basic necessities _were_ was somewhat more complicated. Cultural expectations so far as clothing went varied quite a lot, especially when considering peoples like the Mandoade, who had been comparatively isolated for most of their history. Even just keeping to Mandoade, what exactly was considered appropriate could be wildly different depending on the environment, locale, and the species being considered. Most had adapted the traditions of the Taung, the founder species of their culture, but not all of them.

Traditionally, she knew, if the environment permitted — which, since Mandoade preferred to settle the equatorial regions of C-class words, it generally did — prepubescent children often wore nothing at all. (Decency standards were more complicated for older individuals, but given Sasha's age that didn't really matter.) Though, this was usually only considered appropriate among Mandoade. In mixed groups it was a bit harder to predict, could be altered by all sorts of factors. A sort of loose frock was typical, for both girls and boys — by the look of what little was left, Sasha had been wearing something of the like when her family had been killed, though it was too dirty and decayed for Cina to guess much more than that.

Dresses and skirts were actually _very_ common among Mandoade of all ages — and both sexes, in fact, which was sort of hilarious, given pangalactic human gender norms and the reputation Mandoade had. Trousers were meant to be worn under armor which, logically, was only expected to be worn by warriors, and the warrior caste only made up about a quarter of Mandoade society. Most outsiders tended to forget about that little detail.

But, okay, that was doable, there was a selection of dresses and such in suitable sizes. Though, she couldn't get anything too...well, pretty. Mandoade as a rule eschewed pointless frippery, it was quite possible Sasha would refuse to wear anything considered elaborate by their standards. Which narrowed the acceptable options considerably. Though, another problem, she honestly couldn't remember what Mandoade did for underclothes. Warriors, she remembered what they wore, but everyone else, children... Yeah, she was blanking on that. Oh well.

In the end, she grabbed an armful of loose dresses, skirts, and sleeveless tunics, in muted colours and as plain as she could find. (By the look of them, the tunics were probably intended to be worn as pinafores — that is, over something else — but she doubted Sasha would care.) She got some ordinary thins, though she honestly didn't know if Sasha would bother wearing them. After a brief moment of hesitation, Cina grabbed a few pairs of shorts too — it would certainly be unusual for a girl Sasha's age to wear something like this, but Sulem _was_ a warrior clan, and Cina and Kandosa, the only people on the ship Sasha shared a language with, wore solely trousers, so she thought...

Well, she didn't know what she thought. She'd spent vanishingly little time around children (that she recalled, anyway). Seriously traumatised Mandoade orphan girls, yeah, this was _not_ in her area of expertise. She was just rolling with it, really.

As long as she was here, she picked up some for herself too. She hadn't had a change of clothes for nearly two weeks, and she'd hardly had the opportunity to wash them — most modern materials could go quite a while without needing attention, but it was starting to get disgusting. She didn't go nuts, just got a few pairs of simple trousers and shirts — some of them were actually sized for men but, frustratingly, the fabric was more durable, she _really_ did hate clothing manufacturers sometimes — and plenty of thins, because gross. After another brief moment of hesitation, she picked up a sundress for herself. She didn't normally wear this sort of thing very often, but it would be more comfortable lounging around the ship, so fuck it. A few more thins in her best guess at Mission's size and there, she was done.

The attendant looked bloody ecstatic to be selling all this at once. Given the size of the population on this world, and that a significant portion of those were Jedi, Cina rather doubted they saw this much business very often.

Laden with her bags, Cina started back for the ship...then immediately made a brief detour, stopping by a nearby corner shop. Kang's ship was rather well-stocked with food and the standard toiletries, but he clearly didn't have women along often. Cina would be getting her period in a few days, and Mission was more than old enough — Twi'leks actually started earlier than humans, on the average — so, yeah, stocking up was probably a good idea.

By the time she was making it back to the ship, awkwardly shuffling with too many bags slung over her shoulders, sunset had already passed, the western sky still afire with a lingering pink-orange glow but night swiftly approaching. Also, Shan was back, standing at the foot of the ramp, arms crossed, glaring out toward the eastern horizon with an air that couldn't quite be called moody. During her absence, she'd apparently taken the opportunity to change, shrouded in generic Jedi robes of white and brown — which Cina found slightly surprising, given the far more form-fighting getup Shan had been in when they'd met, but she guessed that nonsense right there would be hard to properly fight in. Multiple times, as Cina gradually approached, one foot would tap a couple times at the flattened and scorched ground of the landing field before seemingly catching itself. Shan was clearly impatient, and just as clearly failing to suppress it.

When Cina was still some metres away, she noticed Shan was looking directly toward where that vision had taken place. So, she could still feel it too. Cina had been mostly successful at ignoring it so far, it was unnerving.

"I didn't expect you back so soon."

Shan jumped, jerked around to face her. Then, amusingly, she _blushed_ — just slightly, it was barely visible in the fading light, but it was there. Probably embarrassed she'd been out of it enough for Cina to get this close unnoticed. "Where have you been? The Council have asked to meet with you, I've been trying to find you for over ten minutes."

Brushing past Shan onto the ramp, Cina scoffed. "You couldn't have been trying very hard. It's not like I know how to hide from a Jedi."

"It is considered inappropriate to pinpoint someone's location by violating their mind and those of the people around them." By the slightly shifty, awkward tone on her voice, that was at least partially shite. (If Cina had to guess, she didn't _actually_ need to intrude on people's thoughts to track them, she was just making excuses for not taking the initiative.) Stomping up the ramp after her, she said, what _almost_ sounded like anger tightening her voice, "Didn't you hear me? We are expected."

"They'll just have to wait."

"You don't just make the—"

"Hey, Mission." The girl was still sitting where Cina had left her, on one of the low sofas in the central room next to Zaalbar, plugging away at...some electronic thing, Cina wasn't an expert. Before Mission could say anything, Cina dropped one of the smaller bags in her lap. She was about ninety per cent certain that was the right one. "I guessed your size, if I got it wrong tell me and I'll trade them in."

Mission stared up at her, those big reddish-brown eyes of her slowly blinking. "Uuuhhhh..."

"If you and Zaalbar need anything, just say the word. Since I'm apparently filthy rich." Without another word, Cina turned on her heel and walked off, Shan still tailing her like an anxious shadow.

While Cina was dropping off supplies in the fresher, Shan again decided to make a nuisance of herself, standing in the doorway and glaring at her. "The Masters are not accustomed to being made to wait. Your impertinence will not render you a favourable first impression."

Cina fought down a smirk at Shan's prim tone. She'd already noticed the uptight Jedi forced her voice into stilted, painfully meticulous Basic when she was uncomfortable — it was rather adorable, actually, but Shan would probably assume she was mocking her (not without reason). "Then perhaps I should have been told I might be called so soon. I might have chosen to put off my errands if I'd known." Cina walked out the door, forcing Shan to step back to get out of her way. "But, I wasn't warned, so they'll just have to wait until I'm ready."

In the cargo hold their stowaway had made her home — Cina suspected she slept in one of the boxes toward the top of one of the stacks in the back, but she'd intentionally not looked for it — she dropped the rest of the bags. She was sorting through them, laying out on the floor everything she'd bought for Sasha, when Shan caught up with her again. "This is a serious matter, Cina, you can't... What are you doing?"

"You didn't think I'd leave the poor girl in rags, did you?"

Shan's eyes narrowed into a considering, confused frown. So far, the only people who had actually seen Sasha were Kandosa and herself — while Mission had taken her word for it, even asking how she could help with her, Shan and Carth seemed uncertain whether to believe Sasha existed at all. Well, Carth had come right out and said they were all insane, Shan just gave her doubtful looks about it.

Which was...odd. Shouldn't Shan be able to feel her? In that odd magic sixth sense Jedi had, she meant. Cina could. Not very well, granted, at least not while she was hiding. When she let herself be seen, Sasha practically _burned_ — Cina couldn't imagine how Shan could possibly miss her, even from the opposite end of the ship. Cina _had_ been trained in the past, yes, but she didn't remember any of it, she'd think Shan should be much better at this.

Maybe Sasha was just _that_ good, controlling her, her _presence in the Force_ (was that how it was said?) enough it didn't get far enough for Shan to feel it. She could obviously mask it entirely, or _almost_ entirely, maybe that was possible. Cina had no bloody clue.

Once all of Sasha's things were unloaded, Cina stood back up, called out into the hold in Mandoa. "These are for you, Sasha. Take what you want, go ahead and leave anything you don't like or that doesn't fit." Cina doubted Sasha would appear to respond with Shan standing there — she hadn't when Mission had tried to introduce herself, and there were few beings less physically imposing than a teenage Twi'lek girl — so she picked up her own new clothes and just walked out.

"Is that it, then? Will you come now?"

Dropping her bags on the bunk she'd claimed, Cina used the opportunity of her back being turned to roll her eyes. Honestly, she'd think Shan would get the message eventually. "One brief matter to attend to first." She turned to drop to a seat on her bed, starting pulling at the laces of her boots.

Shan was glaring at her again. "Tell me it isn't a nap."

"It isn't a nap." Once her boots were off, Cina got up to her feet again. One by one, she removed the pouches and holsters clipped to her belt — most of them she'd already emptied after waking up on the ship, but she needed to get rid of them before extricating the belt itself from the waistband of the rough, threadbare trousers she'd been wearing for weeks.

"What are you doing?"

"That can't be hard to guess. You changed into fresh clothes as soon as you could yourself." Cina pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it away, pushing down and stepping out of her trousers a moment later.

Shan, she noted at a glance with some amusement, was consciously looking away from her, eyes tipped up and to her left. "The Council will not appreciate time being wasted over such inanities."

"Did you change before meeting them, or after they told you to come get me?" Cina pulled her undershirt over her head; when she could see again, Shan had already turned her back, crossed arms forcing her shoulders rigidly set in mixed embarrassment and irritation. She couldn't quite repress a snort of laughter. True, she was completely nude now — she'd been pretty damn close to it a moment ago, her thins having gone with her trousers, but apparently her undershirt was long enough Shan hadn't noticed — but she would expect Jedi to be the last people to care. "I'm sorry, are you even allowed to be embarrassed? _There is no emotion_ , and all that."

Her voice coming out a bit sharp, Shan said, "Jedi are to reject vanity."

Reaching for a new pair of knickers, Cina rolled her eyes. "Honestly, Jedi philosophy is so bloody stupid sometimes."

"You don't—"

"There is a critical difference between a lack of modesty and vanity." For a brief moment, Cina considered whether she should wear the dress she'd just bought, but decided against it — there was no point in thumbing her nose at the Jedi more than she had to, no matter how funny it might be. "Body modesty, fundamentally, is born out of shame, the kind of negative, harmful emotion I'd think you Jedi would try to avoid. You're not uncomfortable with nudity from a rejection of vanity, but an excess of prudishness. Prudishness is of pedantry, itself a form of self-righteousness born of arrogance. Shame and arrogance, you're obviously growing quite frustrated with me — you're not exactly demonstrating that supposed Jedi serenity right now, are you?"

Shan said nothing. She just stood there, her back turned, arms firmly crossed, posture so tense it was almost brittle.

Right, she'd had her fun, she'd needled Shan enough for the moment. She couldn't help it though, it was just so _easy_. After a bit of fumbling, Cina finally got the damn belt through the bloody loops, reached for the leather pouch her inherited lightsaber was in. She nearly hung it from her waist before rethinking it. She'd only hidden the thing like this because openly carrying a lightsaber on the streets of Taris would attract unwanted attention. Here on Dantooine, there was no reason she couldn't just clip it directly onto her belt. "Okay, I'm presentable again — your irrational sensibilities are no longer in danger of being violated." Okay, she was _mostly_ done needling Shan...

The Jedi said nothing in response. Instead, she let out a slightly harsher breath, not quite intense enough to be considered a sigh. Then she simply started walking, leading the way out into the hall. Passing through the common room again, Cina lingered only long enough to explain where she was going and that she had no idea when she was going to be back, then continued on, following Shan down the ramp and out into the Dantooine night.

Toward the Council. The Jedi Masters who had originally requested her assistance in an archaeological project that probably didn't even exist. The same Masters who, she suspected, had mind-raped the person she'd once been into oblivion.

If her time on Taris hadn't proven she was quite good at pulling idiotic stunts and coming out alive, she might be more worried this was going to blow up in her face.

* * *

Zeltrons vs. Zeltrosi — _Zeltrons are the near-human species native to Zeltros. Zeltrosi are Zeltrons plus the minority populations of the world (or members of off-world enclaves) that have integrated, adopting the native culture. This is a distinction only Zeltrosi (or people who are aware of the social situation on Zeltros, like Lesami) are likely to make. Generally, non-Zeltrosi would assume the Zeltrons consider the non-Zeltron inhabitants of their world to be...well, aliens. As far as Zeltrosi are considered, that indefinable something that makes a person one of them is more cultural than it is biological. Rather like Mandalorians in that way, actually._

Chess — _Chess_ _ **does**_ _exist in Star Wars canonically._

syndical democracy — _In case anyone was wondering, this is not a real term (so far as I know). In politics, a "syndicate" is a group of people who have self-organised (usually democratically) to promote their own interests. Archetypal syndicates would be, like, trade unions, the laborers in a city or even a specific workplace, the farmers in a particular locality, that sort of thing. Anarcho-syndicalism is a leftist political system wherein syndicates cooperate to administrate a region/nation (so far as anarchists believe in administration). The anarchists in the Spanish Civil War were anarcho-syndicalists (_ _ **not**_ _the Communists, many people forget that war had three sides), and a number of modern thinkers advocate for the idea to this day, Noam Chomsky being a prominent example._

 _The made-up term "syndical democracy" is meant to refer to a proportional representative democracy where the makeup of the parliamentary delegation is determined by the relative membership of self-organized syndicates instead of political parties. (Though, in this system, those "syndicates" would look more like labor unions or special interest groups, if more democratic than is typical irl.) There's far too much top-down direction and the central government is far too powerful for the Empire to be called properly anarcho-syndicalist, though there are similarities in the foundational principles._

Hutt genocide against the Tionese — _Canon. See wiki entry for "Ash Worlds"_

Perlemian War — _Called the Tionese War in canon. The Republic really did reject their surrender and bomb Deservo into oblivion._

Bombing of Alsakan — _Expanded from the canon Cleansing of Rucapar in the Third Alsakan Conflict._

Bothan culture — _The Bothans really were a target of the Crusades, the rest is my headcanon._

[the Dalinar, or the Teirasan, or the Marshak, or the Kwenni, or the Namlhta, or the Dras] — _Canon doesn't name any of the species successfully exterminated during the Crusades, with the exception of the Teirasan (though their ultimate fate wasn't specified), just vaguely says some were. So I made a few up._

Mandalor — _Canon is "Mand'alor", but I think putting a syllable break there feels really awkward. Even if they were separate morphemes originally, it seems likely to me speakers would slur them together just to make it easier to say._

CL-class — _Example from a completely made up planetary classification system. Due to the many different species around the galaxy, and their different environmental needs, these classes are based on direct comparison to a selection of important planets (which still leads to hundreds of distinct classes, because the galaxy is bloody huge). CL is technically a sub-category of C, which would be roughly equivalent to M-class planets in Star Trek, Earth-like. Because the size and brightness of the star_ _ **is**_ _important for a litany of reasons, the C-class is broken up according to the class of the system's star. As examples, CR is Coruscant-like (stellar class *F6V), CL is Corellia-like (G2V, the same as our sun), and CZ is Zeltros-like (K7V)._

 _*There is a serious problem in the canon involving Coruscant. It's strongly suggested to be the world humans originally evolved on; on Earth that process took roughly 4.6 billion years. Coruscant's sun is described as blue-white, which would suggest either A or B-class; let's say A, to prevent getting too much UV light (though even A would present issues). Problem there? The life-span of A-class stars is measured in the hundreds of MILLIONS of years, which isn't nearly long enough to allow life to evolve as it did on Earth. I kicked it down to a white F-class star, but that would still only last for a few billion years. This is..._ _ **possible**_ _, I guess, but it does strain credulity a bit. It's more likely humans evolved somewhere else originally, and were later moved to Coruscant by the Celestials or the Rakata for one reason or another._

 _(On the other hand, Zeltros's sun being K-class is 100% believable. K7 might be starting to get too small, but I wanted the more orangish tone, and it's still_ _ **far**_ _more plausible than Coruscant's sun being blue-white, seriously, what the fuck.)_

thins — _Semi-canon slang for underwear. It is somewhat euphemistic, would be like saying "smalls"._

* * *

 _Wow, too many notes. I am nerd._

 _Yes, the Republic really did canonically commit all those atrocities in their history. Not to mention, their political system really can't be legitimately called democratic, and there are **huge** issues with poverty and organised crime. Really casts the canon conflicts in a different light._

 _And yes, Sasha has been reframed as a Mandalorian refugee, orphaned in one of Kang's more bloody backstabbings. There **are** reasons for that — mostly that I have issues with her canon background, and this means I can do more interesting things with her down the road._

 _Anyway, I'm done. Next chapter opens with Cina meeting the Council, which I'm sure will go perfectly smoothly._


	12. Drawing Lines — II

The inside of the Jedi complex was nearly as dark and quiet as the rest of the town.

Dinar Enai, being on an undeveloped world with a tiny population, was perhaps the least busy place Cina had ever been in her life. Even so soon after sunset, there had been absolutely no one on the streets, the only light pouring in from the occasional unshuttered window, silent save for occasional snatches of conversation flittering by, too soft to make out. The constant chittering and chirping of a million foreign insects was by far the loudest sound carried through the night air, so quiet the subtle hum of electricity running through the ground was actually audible.

On the way Cina noticed, to her shock, that she could make out the smoky line of the galactic disk stretching across the sky, distant dust clouds and nebulae back-lit by stars bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, shortly over the horizon the larger, brighter core, glowing a pure, clean white. Cina didn't think she'd ever actually _seen_ the disc and the core from the surface of a planet before. It was more easily visible from space, of course, the view from down here dimmer and less detailed, but even that was new to her — she'd spent her whole life in the core, she hadn't seen the disc in person until she'd looked out of the _Endar Spire_ when they'd briefly stopped over Garqi. She'd stayed at the viewport for some minutes, just staring out at the winding band of the galaxy, and...

Cina was distracted by the memory. Something about that felt like a lie. She meant, that memory itself, staring out at the disc from the _Spire_ , that had certainly happened. Just... The disc and core seen from the rim was beautiful, yes, but it hadn't _actually_ felt as...wondrous as it should, if she'd never seen it before. It just hadn't occurred to her to wonder about that at the time, she hadn't known Cianen Hayal was fake yet.

She still preferred to avoid thinking about all that, at least in any depth. It made her...uncomfortable.

In any case, the point was, the Dantooine night held a sort of eerie beauty, silent and dark, the sky overhead more dense with subtly twinkling stars than any she could recall seeing. It made her feel a little strange, she couldn't even explain exactly how, but she thought she rather liked it.

The silence and the darkness continued through the Jedi complex. The gardens acting as a barrier against the town, populated with trees and flowering bushes from dozens of worlds, were absent any beings, any signs of technology at all, the only sounds the gentle sussurring of leaves on the low wind, the occasional lapping of an unseen creature slipping into one of the little ponds, the constant chorus of insects. The lights were all off in the complex itself, save for the occasional dimly-burning argon torch at the corners of roofs, the tips of towers, painting only the most subtle, murky sense of an outline.

Shan led her to a hallway, low-ceilinged and wide, even here so dark Cina could barely make out her surroundings, reddish diode strips at the corners between floor and walls set at such a low intensity she only got a vague impression of greyish shapes, nothing particularly clear. At the end of the long hall was a central courtyard, again too dark to make out much in the way of detail — plenty of more bushes, a tall tree at the centre, thin, twisting branches blotting out a significant portion of the sky. Shan led her into another hall, this no different than the other, around a curving hallway, and finally to a door, the ceiling here having arced up a bit, allowing the rounded frame to stretch rather higher over her head than any of the previous.

A few metres away, Shan petered to a halt. She turned to face Cina, her features mostly hidden in shadow, only a faint sense of her profile, a subtle twinkle marking her eyes. Her voice hardly at a whisper, she started, "The Council... They are not accustomed to being spoken to with the sort of effrontery you've shown with me."

Cina felt one eyebrow tick up her forehead — Shan wouldn't be able to see it anyway, so she didn't bother trying to keep it down. "I don't see how your Masters being accustomed to sycophants could possibly be my problem."

"That right there is exactly the sort of thing you should try to avoid saying."

"I think I know how to speak for myself, thanks. Are we going in, or what?"

For long seconds, Shan stared at her through the darkness, anxious, nauseating sparks flying through the brief space between them. Then she let out a thin sigh, so quiet Cina hardly heard it, before turning back toward the doors.

The Council chamber itself was wide and tall, at the base of one of the towers she'd noticed from the outside — which was apparently hollow, empty space stretching a good fifteen metres above her head. It was noticeably brighter in here, though not by a whole lot, white lamps illuminating a circle at the centre but leaving the rest in shadow, the edges and heights of the room left murky and indistinct. At the opposite side of that circle, curving in a short arc, stood four beings — two humans, one dark-skinned and one light, a rutian Twi'lek, and an absolutely tiny being, didn't even reach the others' waists, that Cina didn't recognise.

At a level that was not truly seen, the four Jedi Masters filled the entire space with a soft, gentle glow, deep and brilliant, pleasantly cool against her skin.

Shan didn't hesitate a second, kept walking forward until she reached the edge of the brightened space in the middle, where she stopped, dipped into a shallow bow. She glanced back at Cina, gestured her forward with a sideways tilt of her head. Cina obeyed, swimming through the subtle sense of benevolent energy filling the air, her head going slightly fuzzy with it. She planted herself right in the middle, stared back at the Jedi, who hadn't twitched at her approach, barely seemed to blink.

Cina took a double take at the Twi'lek, over the next long, silent moments her eyes involuntarily drawn to him again and again. He was a middle-aged man, old enough his skin had started to wrinkle and lighten, pale lavender eyes steady but soft. He seemed oddly...familiar. Which, Cina had never met this man in her life, but the feeling was unmistakable, and _very_ distracting.

She could only assume she'd known him before. Rather well, if the nauseating twinge at the left side of her head meant anything.

It was the Twi'lek who spoke first, actually, the new-yet-familiar voice just making her head hurt all the more. "Good evening, Professor Hayal. My name is Zhar Lestin."

That spot over her left ear flared for a second, Cina tried not to wince.

"With me are Masters Vrook Lamar—" He indicated the pale-skinned human, an aging, balding man, sharp eyes narrowed in something just short of a scowl. "—Vandar Tokare—" That was the little, unfamiliar being, with mottled brown skin, huge, floppy ears, a bald head that revealed long, wrinkled ridges stitching across his (she guessed) wide brow, peculiar three-fingered hands held folded in front of him. His brilliant green eyes seemed disproportionately large for his skull, his wide lips pulled into what _might_ be a faint smile, it could be hard to tell with unfamiliar species. "—and Dorak, Chronicler of our Enclave here." This was the dark-skinned human, a man looking only slightly younger than Lamar, though even more thoroughly bald, pinning Cina with what felt like an evaluating stare. "Bastila has just been informing us of what transpired on Taris."

Lestin fell silent at that, and none of the others seemed to be moving to pick it up. After long, awkward seconds, Cina decided she might as well say something, despite that that really hadn't felt like it was inviting comment. "Yes, that was an...interesting detour."

Lamar's scowl deepened, but Dorak and Lestin actually looked faintly amused. "I suppose it was that."

Tokare jumped in, his voice surprisingly low and rumbling for his stature. "On behalf of our Order and the Republic as a whole, we must thank you for your assistance in recovering young Bastila. Her battle meditation — a rare talent, one which might only present itself once in a generation — has proven critical in our efforts against Malak and his Sith. To have her once again slip through his fingers must have angered him greatly."

The words came before she could think to stop them. "Given what he did to Taris, I guess it must have."

All faces turned rather more solemn, the gentle power in the air going tense, colder. "Yes," muttered Lamar, voice low and dark, "such is the madness of those fallen to the Dark Side."

Cina almost spoke impulsively again — she was pretty sure Alek was just nuts, the _Dark Side_ had little to do with it — but she managed to hold it in this time.

With a weak, half-hearted smile, Lestin said, "Regardless, you have performed a great service to the Republic. It will not be forgotten."

She shrugged. "It just seemed the thing to do." It probably wasn't worth pointing out that Carth had essentially guilt-tripped her into helping him — not that she regretted it, she likely would have fallen into an existential crisis about the whole fake memory thing if she hadn't had something to distract herself with. (Not to mention, Alek would have levelled Taris anyway, she'd be dead right now if she hadn't helped.) "Though, if you _really_ want to thank me, I guess you could reimburse me for the twenty million credits I spent on the operation."

Now Lamar was just plain glaring at her, the other Masters looking less severe, though they didn't seem particularly pleased either.

Before any of them could chastise her, Cina said, "That was supposed to be a joke, by the way." Mostly because she knew expecting the Jedi to compensate anyone for their assistance was a bit naive. If they were under contract, sure, but just some random, uninvolved person deciding to offer their help of their own free will? No, the Jedi didn't have a reputation for rewarding good citizens. "I didn't do any of it all with expectation of reward, I... Well, I just did it."

Lestin's lips tilted with the slightest trace of a smile, and Dorak also seemed amused, if faintly, but while the other two didn't lighten up quite so much they at least weren't glaring at her anymore. "Yes," Lamar grumbled, with the sense of admitting something distasteful with all due reluctance, "it is undeniable that your assistance was critical in getting Bastila off Taris before she was lost forever. But, given that, your methods still leave...much to be desired."

She tried to stop herself — belatedly, a weak effort when it was already far too late — but she still rolled her eyes with a scoff. " _This_ again? Honestly, I already got this whinging from Carth. In under three weeks, I secured a safehouse and funding, allies that proved absolutely _necessary_ to our success, rescued Shan over there from slavery right under the noses of armed and hardened men _by the hundreds_ , and devised a strategy to secure us transportation and slip through the blockade — a strategy which worked, _flawlessly_. I would like to see anyone do better."

With a slight sense of reproach, though it was unclear toward who, Lestin started, "My colleague did not intend to diminish your—"

"Then maybe just a little bloody appreciation is in order, don't you think?"

All of four of the Masters went silent, almost impossibly still, staring back at her for long, awkward seconds. They weren't all wearing the exact same expression, some more blank than others, but it was plainly clear all of them were less than happy with that little outburst.

Her eyes tipping up to the ceiling, Cina let out a long sigh. "Look, I'm sorry, I'm just... I'm just tired, okay? I've had a long couple weeks." Though she'd felt oddly tired before that, that wasn't really pertinent. "I've gotten this conversation several times already from Carth, and now a few from Shan. I just... I achieved all of our objectives, with no losses, or even serious injuries. There were, to my knowledge, no civilian casualties, or even significant property damage. More than that, I went out of my way to _help_ locals — Mission _did_ end up providing critical assistance, yes, but I had no way of knowing that at the time, rescuing her and Zaalbar from slavers was entirely impulsive. I did _nothing_ wrong. If you're suggesting I could have done something differently, and still be standing here right now, I do not see it."

Lamar, like the _arse_ it was becoming increasingly clear he was, outright scoffed at that. "I suppose you think the whole lot of speeders you blew up, or the people who died in the chaos, don't count. Or the who even knows how many people at the swoop race. Or the dozens of people between you and the ship you'd chosen."

"At the swoop race, I only killed the people who posed a direct threat to us. I'm sure plenty died in the fighting, but you can't lay that on me — we may have set it off, but those gangs have been on the edge of war for years, their choices where their own. Besides, there was no other practical way to get to Shan." She shrugged. "And the rest _don't_ count. I don't know how the Jedi see it, but, in my book, slavers are acceptable targets."

"Perhaps," Tokare said, his rumbling voice as light as he could probably make it. "Though, it is likely many of those beings were killed for circumstances outside their control."

"When someone joins an organisation like that, they know full well what they're getting into, and violence comes with the job. They knew what they were contributing to, and they knew they might die for it one day. And they signed on anyway." Cina shrugged, high and exaggerated, dismissing the topic. "I'm sure this isn't what you wanted to talk to me about."

"What makes you so certain of that? I think there's quite a lot here to discuss."

Cina shot Lamar a disbelieving glance. "Do you also think I'm an idiot? The only reason I was on Taris in the first place was because I was being brought here. To help with an archaeological project I doubt even exists."

One of the Masters started asking a question — Cina wasn't really paying attention to which, he only got a few words in.

Because she realised what he was asking very quickly, and cut him off. "I used to be a Jedi. Shan must have told you I figured it out. Whyever you wanted me here, I suspect it has far more to do with that, the dig was just a ploy."

It was hard to say exactly what it was telling her this. She meant, their expressions hadn't noticeably shifted, the soft feel on the air hadn't changed that much. But, somehow, she felt the sudden intensity of their attention on her, the Masters watching her every twitch. Slowly, carefully, Lestin asked, "Just how much do you remember?"

"Very little." She shrugged, forcing the gesture easy and casual. "Just, flashes, really. Nothing particularly coherent, very little of it even makes any sense. I know I'm from a wealthy Shawkenese family, and that I was sent to the Temple on Coruscant when I was...ten, maybe, somewhere around there. I know I fought in a war, but if Shan hadn't told me I was Revanchist I wouldn't even be able to say for sure which one. I could guess, obviously, but..."

From Lamar, his sharp eyes slightly narrowed, "You know you also joined the Sith."

"I don't remember anything about that, honestly. I suspect some of those flashes are with the Revanchists, and some with the Sith, but I can't tell which are which."

The others falling into watchful silence, it was Tokare who asked the billion credit question. "So, you know everything that is Cianen Hayal is a construction, and who put it there. What do you think of that?"

Cina considered how to respond for a moment — very, very carefully. "I'm fortunate, I suppose."

"Fortunate?" Oddly, Lestin actually looked surprised, enough it broke through the stereotypical Jedi equanimity.

"Sure. All else being equal, I'd rather be alive than the alternative. Since... As I understand it, from what Shan said, the damage was such that... Well, if my choices are having an entirely constructed identity, with all the false memories to match, and being dead, I know which one I prefer."

(Cina refused to entertain any doubts that might or might not be possible about what she was saying.)

After a brief, considering silence, the tension in the room swiftly dissipated, the subtle weight on her shoulders lifting away as the Masters visibly relaxed. Another faint smile touched Tokare's oversized lips. "We here have long held to a belief that all beings, no matter their crimes, are entitled to a chance at redemption. A belief that has sometimes led to intense disagreements with the High Council on Coruscant. It is heartening to hear that you are taking this opportunity as the gift it is." He didn't _sound_ particularly heartened, but that was Jedi for you.

The words nearly brought forth a flash of anger, but Cina forced it down, quenched the fires before they could properly rise. "It's not really redemption, though, is it? That would require...well, for me to still be the same person. Which I'm not, really."

"You are more yourself than you might realise." At her questioning glance, Lestin _almost_ flinched, the slightest twitch of his lips. He visibly mulled over his words for a couple seconds. "It was determined that, in constructing a new identity for you, it would be ideal for your personality and interests to be as similar as possible to that which was lost. Those who knew you well have always noted your interest in history, and the varied cultures of this galaxy, often expressed in a fascination with the minutia of how different peoples communicate between each other and among themselves. You wrote many essays on such topics as an apprentice, in fact.

"And, while you have certainly always held the principles of the Republic and even the Order in the highest esteem, you frequently found much to criticise in the practice. We believe it was, in part, this...disillusionment that ultimately led you into the Sith — a path that, we hope, a more distanced perspective may prevent you from walking again. But, taken all together, academia — particularly some form of liberal arts with the University of Aldera — seemed the best fit."

She was calling Lestin's bluff on some of that. For one thing, it strongly hinted at their lie about her mind being entirely destroyed, without explicitly revealing it. If everything she had been _was_ gone, or at least the vast majority of it, she shouldn't see why it would be _ideal_ to match her old personality as well as was possible. But, given what she knew now, the reason behind that was pretty obvious: the more similar Cianen Hayal was to who she'd once been, the fewer conflicts there would be between the artificial personality and the one buried under it, the less likely she was to be pushed to realise something about herself that didn't quite make sense. There _had_ been things, as early as her weeks back on Coruscant — she had stumbled on languages she knew but didn't remember studying, and it was quite obvious, looking back on it, that she was accustomed to a degree of luxury that did not match her history — but the clues had been subtle enough she hadn't thought about it too hard. The latter she'd just written off as abusing the opportunity to charge everything to an expense account, the former as, well, she _had_ studied an absurd number of languages, maybe she had just forgotten.

In fact, if everything hadn't quickly gone to shite, she might never have noticed anything was wrong, at least not nearly so soon. Getting that concussion on the _Spire_ , she'd been too delirious to think things through too hard, she'd simply _acted_ — and in the process revealed instincts and knowledge and skills she hadn't realised she'd had. If she hadn't gotten that head injury, if she hadn't been forced into situations where she'd had to rely on her previously forgotten combat abilities to survive, she wouldn't have determined Cianen Hayal was a lie, might never have had cause to put it together.

Shan jumping at the 'opportunity' to hit Alek had been a critical mistake on more levels than had been immediately obvious.

But, while that was an interesting thought, Cina didn't let herself linger on it too long — if she did, she would likely start getting annoyed, and she didn't want the Masters to realise just how effectively she was managing to mischaracterise how she felt about all this. (At least, she thought she was pulling it off, they'd probably react differently if they knew she was trying to fool them.) Luckily, a different thought had occurred to her. Lestin had sounded somewhat...odd, saying that, a peculiar reluctance touching the usual gentle apathy Jedi tried to speak with, and that made her wonder... "I'm sorry, Master, did we know each other, before? I was already wondering about that — you seem...familiar."

The other Council members glanced at each other, a subtle sense of anxiety touching the air, but Lestin just stared back at her. He smiled again, with a faint sense of...of sadness, of regret. Which was a strange thing to see on a Jedi Master. "I suppose there is no danger in telling you this. Yes, we did know each other before. Long before he was Darth Malak, he was my padawan, you see. The Revanchists were all Coruscanti Jedi, many around the same age — I was at least familiar with most all of them."

"I was close to them, wasn't I? Lesami and Alek."

There were a couple quelling looks from the rest of the Council, but Lestin answered anyway. "Even among the earliest of the Revanchists, there were two groups. There was the core group, composed of Revan and Malak's closest friends and associates at the Temple, and a larger, more diverse one, many of whom did not know them personally, but were drawn to follow Revan for one reason or another. You were one of the former, yes."

Cina had a weird thought. "I'm not Nisotsa Thul, am I?" The (limited) monarchy on Alderaan had been being passed back and forth between three noble houses for some centuries now: Ulgo, Panteer, and Thul. (The crown couldn't simply be inherited, the new monarch must be confirmed by Parliament, so it moved around.) Their current monarch was a Panteer, but the previous one had been a Thul — Nisotsa was his granddaughter. Certain peculiarities of her sacrifice to the Jedi had come up in the succession, in fact, it became a bit of scandal, played a role in the Thuls losing the crown this time.

During the war with the Mandoade, Nisotsa had played more of a diplomatic role, not primarily a frontline fighter. (Though she still did participate in her fair share of battles, of course, they'd needed every Jedi they could get.) Her connections through her family and her work buttering up Republic and local officials had even been the source of the greater part of the Revanchists' political legitimacy — at least, before "Revan" had been made Supreme Commander, anyway. In the Sith, Nisotsa had been their Minister of State, which was essentially their equivalent to the Supreme Chancellor, the president of Parliament and leader of their civilian government. It was known Alek had summarily dismissed her not long after Lesami's death. (Even if one accepted he was Emperor now — an office to which he'd never legally been invested, he'd just unilaterally claimed it — that wasn't a power the Emperor even had under their constitution. Not that most people in the Republic cared about that kind of nuance.) That was, what, five months ago now? four? Cina couldn't recall hearing any news about her since then.

If she had been Nisotsa, that... Well, it wasn't a _perfect_ explanation. For one thing, her accent wasn't Alderaanian. Also, she remembered vacationing on Shawken which...wasn't _necessarily_ evidence against. She didn't have to be Shawkenese for her family to have a vacation home near Mathilnai. Shawken and Alderaan did have ties going back millennia — a number of Shawkenese noble houses, including Lesami's, had originally been Alderaanian noble houses, exiled after a civil war about eight thousand years ago, they'd had a fair bit of economic and cultural contact ever since. And wealthy families did tend to get around, they weren't quite as fixed to a particular locale as lower classes often were. It wasn't out of the question Nisotsa could have spent a fair portion of her childhood on Shawken. Perhaps even enough to have a Shawkenese accent.

Cina wasn't certain it was a perfect fit, but it _would_ explain rather a lot.

Before Lestin could say anything — not that she was certain he was going to, he appeared a little conflicted — Tokare gave a non-answer. "We will neither confirm nor deny your previous identity. We feel doing so may push you down paths better left unwalked."

"Right." She could tell pressing the matter would be pointless. It wasn't that long ago that she _really_ hadn't want to know, and... Well, okay, she still didn't that much, to be honest. She just... For all she'd protested to Carth about such generalisations, she was well aware some of the Sith had done truly horrendous things. And there was that...that cold, dragging _exhaustion_ always looming over her, no matter how much she might try to ignore it, that... Whoever she'd been before, Cina had the feeling she'd been... Well, she would admit to some curiosity, on occasion, but she wasn't certain she actually wanted to know. So, she'd let the idea that she'd been Nisotsa Thul sit as a possibility, but—

No, wait. Wasn't Nisotsa blonde? Cina was pretty sure Nisotsa was rather taller than her too, her figure more obviously feminine. Surgically altering her hair colour was simple, but the rest would take a _lot_ of work. Even a minor height change would require weeks of physical therapy to sort out, and those moments acting on instinct were _far_ too coordinated. Right, never mind.

But anyway, they'd spent long enough on that tangent. Back to the point. "This is fun, but perhaps we can talk about why I'm here."

Lamar scowled at her, but he scowled a lot — Cina was getting the very clear feeling he did _not_ like her. It was Tokare who answered, again. "The answer to that is more straightforward than you think. Essentially, we have not lied about why it is we wanted you here. Recent developments, though, have made things a little more complicated — I am speaking now of the vision you and Bastila shared on your approach."

Cina blinked. "Those were the ruins where the inscriptions you wanted me to translate are from. Where Lesami and Alek went."

"In short, yes. There are ruins scattered about Dantooine, all very old and many bearing a strong resonance with the Force. Some time ago, fresh from their victory against the Mandalorians, Revan and Malak—" Tokare put a subtle stress here, apparently trying to suggest she stop using their actual names. "—came to this world under false pretenses. They told this Council they desired some time alone, here in isolation, to reflect and meditate. We allowed them this, believing it to be an early step on their return to the Order.

"We later learned it was a ruse. They did something at one of these sites — we do not know what, or at which. Whatever it was they did, the entire planet resonated with it, a disturbance in the Force so powerful it was deafening. And then they left. They returned a year later as Sith, with an impossibly large fleet at their backs." This last phrase was said with a subtle sense of suggestion — Tokare even raised a single, prompting eyebrow.

That was a fascinating question few people bothered asking, and none seemed to have an answer to: where exactly _had_ the Sith fleet come from? The core of it was made up of defectors from the Republic, of course, but they were a minority, there were _thousands_ of ships Lesami had seemingly conjured out of thin air. Cina had heard more than once people claim she _had_ simply conjured them, through some inexplicable Jedi magic, people could be very silly about Revan. The most reasonable theory she'd heard was that the Revanchists had stumbled across another advanced society in the Unknown Regions, made an alliance with them, or perhaps just staged a coup, and took command of their military. That was the only one she'd heard that really made any sense at all.

So it was bloody obvious what Tokare was trying to say. "You think whatever they found here pointed them toward wherever they found all those ships of theirs."

"It's not an unreasonable suggestion," said Dorak — he'd hardly spoken at all so far, Cina had nearly forgotten he was there. "They were sighted a few more times across the known galaxy in the following weeks. They then joined up with their defector fleet, which then departed known space, travelling west. The greatest portion of unexplored space lies to the west of the core, comprising perhaps as much as a quarter of the entire galaxy. It is not out of the question that advanced civilisations exist out there, entirely unknown to us. It is not out of the question that two powerful Jedi might have convinced or coerced them into an alliance. Indeed, Intelligence has uncovered evidence to suggest as much."

Tokare picked up the thread. "We suspect their travels throughout the galaxy over those weeks was a pursuit of the information necessary to pick a way through the hyperspace disturbance bisecting the galaxy. It was our hope that, in examining the ruins here as they did, you might be able to replicate this first step, allowing us to put together the rest. We hoped this might prove some advantage in the war, perhaps enough to cripple the assault on the Republic, if only momentarily."

With his patent scowl on his face, Lamar grumbled, "Of course, that's all been blast to hell now."

It took some effort for Cina to hold in a snort — that was a _very_ Corellian thing to say. "How so? Expecting me to translate a completely unknown language _is_ sort of absurd, but that was the idea from the beginning, far as I can tell. What changed?"

"You have started to touch the Force again," Tokare said. "This complicates matters."

Lestin continued, with a slight sense of a smirk on his voice. "This was always a possibility, of course. In fact, I was of the opinion it was an inevitability — you are too strong in the Force to forget it for long. But we'd hoped we would have more time."

There was a subtle implication there, subtle enough Cina probably wasn't supposed to notice, that the Council hadn't been in total agreement on the plan. But that wasn't particularly important at the moment. "How does that change anything?"

Tokare again — it hadn't been spelled out, but she'd gotten the feeling he was a leader of a sort here. "Those ruins are steeped in the Dark Side. For one who is not open to the Force, this is no danger, but for one who is? It is all too easy for the untrained to, unknowingly, let it into themselves, and become twisted by it. And there is the connection between you and Bastila to consider."

Cina frowned. "What connection?"

"Surely you remember the vision the two of you shared. She told us of a similar event, on Taris — you were both asleep, and you were drawn into her dream."

"That..." Well, she _did_ remember that, come to think of it. She didn't remember it very well, just a vague idea of anger and sadness, two Jedi falling into a despair so black and so deep it never ended. It hadn't occurred to her that that might not even be her own dream — of course it hadn't, at the time she hadn't even realised she'd been a Jedi yet. "Was that what that was?"

"Yes," Shan said, from behind her. "I didn't realise what was happening right away, but eventually I noticed your presence. Even when I was cut off from the Force I could still feel you there, if I tried."

"That... Is that a normal thing to happen?"

Dorak spoke this time, his voice slipping into a more academic tone. "It is not a common occurrence, but it is not unheard of. Force-sensitive beings will sometimes develop close connections, powerful enough to be maintained across the galaxy. Most often, such a bond will develop between a student and their Master, slowly over years. It is unusual for one to develop so quickly."

Okay, that made absolutely no sense. From her uninformed perspective, this "connection" sounded rather like a strong personal, emotional bond being reflected through the Force — that it happened so rarely could simply be because Jedi were told they shouldn't form such bonds at all, the master/apprentice relationship the nearest thing they were allowed. But, at that point, she and Shan had only spoken a handful of times, and none of those conversations had been very... They hadn't liked each other, was the point. They _still_ didn't, honestly.

Cina nearly said something about that, but changed her mind at the last second. She didn't think they were wrong about the bond itself existing, no matter how absurd an idea that was, there was no point lingering over the question of how it had formed. Especially since that made absolutely no sense. "And why is that a problem?"

"There are benefits to this sort of bond," Lestin said, "but there are also disadvantages. You might notice, as you progress further in your study of the Force, that thoughts and feelings sometimes drift across from one into the other. If one of you is injured, the other might share the pain. If one of you falls to the Dark, the other might well follow."

Still scowling at her, Lamar ground out, "The lure of the Dark Side is not easy to resist. It may be found outside of us, in places like these ruins, but that is not the true threat. The Darkness exists in all of us — these places simply draw it out, and far too easily. Until you have the discipline to master your own worst impulses, you cannot be allowed near such a place, lest you fall to madness and drag Bastila along with you." Something about the way he said it suggested Lamar didn't think it likely Cina would ever be able to _resist the lure of the Dark Side_.

Which was honestly laughable, Cina had to work to keep a smirk from her face. All this _Dark Side_ stuff just sounded so silly. True, she didn't know a lot about these things, she'd forgotten everything she'd learned with the Jedi, but she thought the idea that there even was such a thing was absurd on the face of it. She meant, the Force was the collective psychic energy of all living things in the universe, right? Something like that. It would follow, then, that if there _were_ such a thing as the "Dark Side" it would simply be an expression of the maliciousness within everyone. The idea of a "fall" to the Dark Side was, by extension, also not a thing, because _nobody_ was entirely destructive, with no benevolent impulses or instincts whatsoever.

But this wasn't really news — Jedi philosophy had always reflected very basic misunderstandings of how life _worked_. Like, okay, the Force was the collective energy of all the life in the galaxy, work with that. One could then say there was one aspect, all the drives and behaviours that promote the continuation of life, then another aspect, all the ones working against the continuation of life. Call them creation and destruction, life and death, Light and Dark, whatever. That would be fine, Cina would have no problem with that, in principle.

The problem was, that was _clearly_ not what the Jedi believed. Under any definition that made sense, the Jedi were not the servants of the "Light" they claimed to be, their interests were not aligned with those of that positive aspect of the Force. For a point of obvious evidence, they weren't even allowed to have families — if there were any instinct that was most closely tied to life itself, it was the reproductive drive. Jedi were, in fact, directed to _remove themselves_ from the ordinary patterns of natural life as much as possible. When it came down to it, that's what their Code was all about.

Similarly, what she remembered reading of Jedi writings on the Dark Side were just... The world just wasn't that simple, _life_ wasn't that simple. The absolutist, black-and-white thinking inherent to Jedi dogma was just... _childish_. She could just be missing something here, but how Jedi kept talking about _evil_ — which was what they meant, they just called it "Darkness" — was, just, patently absurd.

Cina had never seen evidence that true evil actually existed. She didn't expect to ever be convinced otherwise.

But, again, there was really no point to arguing about it. She'd be butting heads with _thousands_ of years of cultural indoctrination and institutional inertia, she'd never get anywhere. Besides, being too contrary would just make dealing with them all the more complicated. "You're saying you mean to train me to be a Jedi."

Somewhat to her surprise, Lestin smiled at her again. "I don't expect you'll find it difficult — you have learned it all before, after all."

That was coming _perilously_ close to admitting she'd never actually had catastrophic brain damage, but okay.

"Understand that there is little choice in this matter — for you, or for us." It was obvious Tokare was trying to seem more solemn, grave, his already low voice dropping further, wrinkled face contracting in a frown to make it seem even more deeply crevaced than it'd been before. But, well, he was just too tiny and ridiculous-looking to take too seriously, it was actually vaguely adorable. "Our ancient Order stands weakened to a degree it has not been for millennia. First we were divided when Exar Kun turned against us, many leaving to follow him, thousands of Jedi dying in the fighting. Only a generation later, we were again divided when the young and the impulsive left in droves for the war on the rim. Again, many Jedi died, and the rest left the Order forever, only one of hundreds returning, and she only briefly."

Her eyes widening involuntarily, Cina nearly interrupted at that. She'd had no idea _any_ of the Revanchists had returned to the Jedi after the war — _all_ the survivors had continued on into the Sith. Well, a few dozen had simply gone missing, but none had actually _come back_.

Even if she hadn't decided to keep her mouth shut, Lamar would have gotten there first. "Even now, Jedi fall to embrace the Dark every day, turning their back on their own to pledge themselves to Malak as their new _dark lord_." The scorn Lamar put on those two words was blistering, and also curious — Cina had been under the impression Jedi weren't allowed hatred. "The lure of the Dark Side is difficult to resist in ordinary times. In these times of conflict and division, the contagion is all the more virulent. If Malak is not stopped, and soon, the Jedi will be no more, and there will be no one to stop him swallowing the Republic star by star. If we don't act quickly and decisively, the galaxy will descend into an era of darkness and tyranny not seen in a thousand generations."

Despite herself, Cina couldn't hold in a snort. Wasn't this whole fiasco because, back when the Mandoade invasions were still contained on the far rim, the Jedi _hadn't_ acted quickly and decisively? A prompt, proportionate response from the Jedi — and the Republic, of course, but the High Council could have dragged the Senate along if they'd wanted to — could have contained the Mandoade before their push toward the core even started. The war would have been much shorter, and Lesami likely wouldn't have been driven to rebel against the Order and the Republic. Honestly, if they hadn't stalled like cowards and displayed a little bloody conviction years ago, the galaxy wouldn't even be in this mess in the first place.

The Masters' faces all tightened with disapproval, Lamar's even with clear anger, his eyes almost burning. Before anyone could ask a stupid question, Cina scrambled for something to say. She didn't stress the thing she'd _actually_ found darkly amusing — it _was_ the very issue that had inspired the creation of the Revanchists, and later the Sith. The fewer doubts about her they ultimately came away with, the better. "I'm sorry, are we just choosing to pretend the Empire isn't a liberal democracy again? I mean, I understand you have personal issues with Malak and his ilk, but referring to the Imperial government as tyrannical is a bit of a stretch."

"You _just_ saw the Sith destroy an entire world, one of their _own_ worlds, and you don't think the word applies?"

Cina rolled her eyes, exaggerating the motion to make _very_ sure Lamar could see it. "Oh, honestly, Alek is _one man_. He has committed horrible atrocities, and he needs to be put down like the mad beast he is, but in time he will be gone, and power will change hands. I seriously doubt whoever succeeds him will be able to ignore the rule of law as he has — so far Alek is skating by on fear and the remaining goodwill he has from his Revanchist days, no future emperor will _ever_ be able to get away with all he has. Imperial citizens have all the same rights we do in the Republic, and, in fact, _broader_ protections against economic exploitation. If the Sith win, it will _hardly_ be the beginning of an _era of darkness and tyranny_. It'll be harsh that first generation or so, of course, and that is reason enough to oppose them, but give the Empire time to stabilise and I doubt the galaxy will actually look that different. It might even be an improvement.

"I'm not saying I _want_ the Empire to take over the galaxy. I'm just saying, at least be intellectually honest when it comes to your justification for fighting them."

The next few moments, there was silence, the air around her suddenly all too sharp and cold. That _almost_ looked like faint horror on the Masters' faces. Er... Oops? She'd thought that would be a safer topic than the Order's own failure to appropriately deal with the war on the rim, but maybe she'd miscalculated.

Finally, after tense minutes that stretched far too long, Tokare grumbled, "This is a separate matter, and ultimately irrelevant."

"This is foolish in the extreme," snarled Lamar, his scowl turning down on his tiny colleague this time. "Once again, you refuse to listen to reason. It is obvious that Revan's influence still hangs over this one. If we allow this to go forward, she _will_ —"

Tokare cut him off with a harsh, "Vrook." For a brief moment the two glared at each other, the silence so thick Cina could taste it. "Be mindful of yourself, old friend. Your thoughts on this matter are poisoned with anger."

"Anger or not, this is folly."

"If you have a better idea," Dorak said, soft and casual, "I would love to hear it. Whatever your reservations, Vandar had the right of it, before: we have no choice."

Cina bit her tongue — her input here probably wouldn't be helpful. But there was _always_ a choice. The consequences of all but one of the options might be unacceptable, but there was still a choice being made.

Turning away from the glaring contest, Lestin said, "So the question is turned to you, Cianen. Your path will be difficult, and the destination unknown. But will you accept this burden all the same, submit yourself to the guidance of this Council, and once again take up the mantle and the blade of a Jedi Knight?"

"I don't suppose I'll be allowed to leave if I say no."

None of them actually answered the question. But from their eyes as they stared at her, Tokare and Lamar even putting a hold on their silent argument to add their own, she knew what that answer would be. Cina sighed, shook her head. There was a choice, there was _always_ a choice, but only one option was in any way palatable.

Even as she agreed, with all the appropriate platitudes, the words tasted of bitterness and despair.

* * *

 _Spotting a particular pair among the crowd of apprentices filling the refectory, Sesai felt his own face split into a smile. He sauntered his way over, dropped his tray onto the table, and flopped into a seat next to one of the girls. By the way she immediately leaned a little away, he'd probably done that invading-personal-space thing, which honestly wasn't even on purpose this time — he was really bad at judging how much distance was appropriate with which species, he couldn't help it. Grinning, he said, "Hey, girls. What's new?"_

 _Right next to him, shooting a sharp glare at him through her bangs, Lesami said, "I don't suppose there's anything I can say this time that will get you to stop talking to us like we're already friends."_

" _Nope, 'fraid not." Tearing his hunk of bread in half, he winked. "I'll win you over eventually, Lesami. I know these things." She didn't dislike him nearly as much she claimed to. In fact, he was certain she didn't dislike him at all. She just felt she had to pretend she did, for some unfathomable reason._

" _How could you possibly? I already proved your Zeltron stuff doesn't work on me."_

 _Yes, she had, which was rather fascinating, honestly. His people — or, a majority of his people, there were a sizeable minority of Zeltrons who didn't have it — could sense the feelings of others, even influence them if they so chose. While Sesai could_ read _Lesami, at least when she wasn't consciously blocking him (which she bothered to do only rarely), she'd proven completely immune to his influence even from the very beginning. Which was interesting, there were fully-trained Jedi who had trouble resisting Zeltrons when they really put an effort into it. Adult Zeltrons, granted, but Sesai had always been talented with it, and Lesami had only been ten when they'd met. It was still impressive._

 _Not that he'd even been that particularly surprised when his attempts to poke at her mind had just bounced right off. Lesami felt...interesting. She was...well, very_ herself _, he guessed, in a way many people weren't — it was hard to convince a mind it should be feeling something other than what it thought it did if it was a hundred percent certain of exactly who and what it was._

 _But all that was entirely irrelevant. "I don't need to use that at all. I'm very charming, you see."_

 _Lesami let out a frustrated scoff, but before she could say anything Nisotsa, in the spot across the narrow table from her, cut out ahead. "Don't bother, Lesami. This one doesn't listen to reason."_

" _I'm very reasonable, I'll have you know." Even as he started picking at his stew, he turned slightly in place, dipping to lean against Lesami's shoulder._

 _She threw him off instantly, nearly hard enough to make him knock over his bowl. "Would you not do that?"_

" _Why?"_

 _For a couple seconds, Lesami was actually speechless, the both of them staring at him with blank, slowly blinking eyes. She glanced over at Nisotsa and said...something, it wasn't in Basic. Nisotsa replied in the same language — some classical Alderaanian language, probably, they had both gotten a very traditionalist education before coming to the Temple. After a few times back and forth, Lesami let out a long sigh, eyes tipping up at the ceiling. "Look, I get that you don't understand_ why _other people might not be comfortable with the sort of things you're inclined to do, but it should be plainly obvious that we are."_

 _Sesai grinned. "If you were actually uncomfortable with the_ sort of things I'm inclined to do _, I wouldn't touch you."_

 _After a brief, low groan, Lesami grumbled, "I hate you,_ shem Rhysa _."_

" _If you want to lie to a Zeltron, you'll have to do a lot better than that."_

" _He's got you there, Lesami," Nisotsa said, trying and failing to hide her smile with her mug. "You're a terrible liar."_

" _I am not. I lie to the Masters all the time." Lesami paused, frowning to herself. "That was probably the sort of thing I shouldn't say out loud."_

" _Probably."_

 _Lifting one shoulder in a languid shrug, he said, "It's easier to lie to Jedi than it is to lie to Zeltrons. To lie to a Jedi, you just have to keep what you're thinking and feeling inside yourself, not let it go out into the Force. Our thing doesn't work through the Force, or at least not the part of the Force Jedi use, some of the Masters aren't even aware they're leaking everything out where I can feel it." Not that the Masters usually felt much of anything interesting at all, not the point. "I don't even really think about it, honestly. It's natural to my people, hardly worth commenting on._

" _Think of it from my perspective," he continued, giving Lesami a crooked grin. "With your words, you keep telling me to leave you alone, but with your head—" He gently poked her in the side of the head; she batted his hand away, shooting him another glare. "—you keep telling me you find me interesting and amusing. Back home, this would be taken as trying to annoy me on purpose, which I personally have no problem with, or as flirting." He smiled, as innocently as he could possibly manage (which wasn't very). "So you can see my problem."_

 _While Nisotsa again tried to hide her amusement, Lesami glared at him some more. "I'm going to pretend you didn't suggest that second possibility."_

" _Fair enough. Annoying me on purpose it is, then — that's fine, I can respect that. But that means I have little reason to not do this." Sesai leaned over a little, laying his arm across her back, his hand coming to rest just over her hip._

 _Lesami tensed slightly, barely enough for him to feel it, her eyes narrowing in annoyance that, this time,_ was _actually echoed in the feelings drifting off of her. Though, it wasn't_ only _annoyance — that sharp heat was there, yes, but there was something else softer and cooler, he wasn't sure exactly how to interpret the mix. "If you're going to be so...well,_ Zeltron—"

 _He snorted out a laugh._

"— _could you maybe_ not _do it in public? I get enough lectures from the Masters already."_

 _At the mild protest, Sesai couldn't help another smile._ That _was what that oddly mixed feeling was about, then — she didn't actually mind that much, she just didn't want to have to deal with the older Jedi preaching at her about...likely "attachment" or something like that, it all bled together at some point. Sesai wasn't particularly surprised, it was something he'd noticed about a lot of the students here, not just Lesami. Some were better at hiding it than others, but it was still very common._

 _In his time since he was sent to the Temple, Sesai had noticed that being a Jedi was, at the heart of it, extremely lonely. Baked into virtually every aspect of the ethos of the Order was a rejection of comforts of all sorts, physical and emotional. Jedi were taught they must reject all their basic needs or risk falling to the Dark Side. Actual meaningful relationships — lovers, yes, but even proper friends, any companionship of any depth — any personal pleasures of any kind — sex was the big one people thought about it, but they were supposed to stay away from all intoxicants as well, or even_ comfortable furniture _, many Jedi even argued they should avoid enjoying or participating in the arts! — any form of physical intimacy, no matter the context, even something so basic as_ a damn hug _, all these were things Jedi were supposed to keep themselves apart from._

 _The problem was, the Jedi believed all this, but they_ also _recruited students very,_ very _young. (Often forcibly — Sesai's family hadn't wanted to give him up, so the Jedi had gotten the Republic to issue a court order to take him from them, and he knew he wasn't the only one with a similar story.) But, well, see, in most sentient species, there were emotional needs people_ must _have met to remain psychologically healthy. This was even more critical with children._

 _He hadn't known this right away, of course — he'd only been eight (uh, five) when the Jedi had taken him — but how he and the other children had been expected to behave had still struck him as very strange right from the beginning. Back home, everyone was encouraged to be completely open about their feelings, be they positive or negative._ Especially _the negative ones — keeping such things inside would only make them fester, it was better to address them right away. With the Jedi, they were expected to get to a point where they didn't feel_ anything at all _, which was just a preposterous idea, everybody felt_ something _, even the Jedi who claimed they didn't. And even the little things, Sesai couldn't count the number of times he'd been chastized for sitting too close to someone, or for hugging, and it'd been so_ cold _at the Temple, he'd barely been able to sleep at first, he couldn't remember_ ever _sleeping alone before coming here..._

 _He'd hated it here at first. Eventually, he had adjusted, but the first few months he'd been so unbearably miserable, he'd honestly thought he was going to die._

 _Years later, his education had progressed to the point he could actually read up on psychology. Turns out? Yeah, he'd been completely justified in doubting how children were treated with the Jedi. It'd been a well-established fact in the field for uncounted millennia that children_ needed _a certain degree of affection and emotional expression as they grew up, that not getting it could have serious, irreversible consequences. There_ were _species that this didn't really apply to, or who simply needed far less of it, but for humans, for any species that showed a similar degree of social bonding? These needs, these instincts couldn't be ignored. It was_ extremely _unhealthy._

 _In fact, Sesai had a theory about that he'd never actually voiced to anyone. It was accepted in the field that people who didn't get the required physical affection and emotional validation in childhood frequently ended up developing a whole variety of mental health issues in adulthood. All too often, the violent and destructive kind. What if, he thought to himself, there was_ no such thing _as the Dark Side? Or, at least, not in the sense the Masters talked about it. What if, he couldn't help but think, what the Jedi called a "fall" to the "corruption" of the "Dark Side" was simply a person lashing out, a person made sad and broken by the unhealthy upbringing the Jedi enforce, a person who, more than anything else,_ needed help _?_

 _What if the Jedi created their own villains through what amounted to institutionalized child abuse?_

 _Yeah, Sesai wasn't an idiot. He kept that theory to himself._

 _(Apparently, it was actually a common strain of criticism among outside academia. He still very much doubted the Masters would appreciate hearing it from him.)_

 _Anyway, the point was, a great number of his fellow apprentices were desperately lonely, even if they would never admit it out loud, or even in the privacy of their own heads. He'd noticed it did influence how they related to each other, sometimes. Lesami, for example, had been slowly gathering people around her since she'd gotten here, the others of their generation who...didn't handle it quite as well, the ones who couldn't quite repress their need for companionship. People like Nisotsa and Alek and...whatever the Verpine's name was (he couldn't even attempt to pronounce it), who needed someone to relate to, needed to share themselves with_ someone _, needed a_ friend _. People like Talvon and Cariaga and Voren, who were barely holding it together, far closer to breaking than anyone wanted to admit, who just needed_ someone _. Without even seeming to realize she was doing it, Lesami, in her own loneliness, was drawing together the others who were equally desperate (and not so brainwashed to ignore it entirely), and allowing them to find in each other what they needed to keep themselves from falling off the edge._

 _He suspected that, without Jedi like Lesami, who bent the rules more than the Masters liked, they would see_ more _Jedi "fall" — not that he expected them to ever admit it, or even realize it._

 _So he wasn't surprised that, while she didn't want to suffer more irritating lectures, she_ was _willing to accept a little comfort when it was offered. They got so little of it, after all._

 _Anyway, she'd said he could at least not do this in public. But, well, "That's a lost cause, Sami — they already don't much like either of us."_

" _Don't call me that," she said, pouting at him._

 _Which was completely adorable, and_ completely _unfair. He had the feeling that if he just went ahead and kissed her she'd probably set his robes on fire or something._

* * *

Cina was, irritatingly, woken up at the crack of dawn, by a tiny Jedi kid of a vaguely avian-looking species she didn't recognise.

She hadn't managed to sleep much, which wasn't a surprise. Her concussion and subsequent medical treatment had adjusted her internal clock to Taris capitol district time rather effectively, but local time here was off by several hours — it'd been after midnight by the time she'd finally been shown to a room here at the Enclave, but it'd felt more like mid-afternoon to her. The day on Dantooine was slightly longer than on Taris, but she'd still only gotten maybe three or four hours of proper sleep, if that many.

The kid had tried to get her to change into the Jedi robes that had been laid out for her, but she'd just swept past him out of the room without a word — honestly, those things just looked uncomfortable and obstructive. He'd caught up after a moment, looking slightly flustered, to lead her off to breakfast.

Where she got yet another bit of unwelcome news: there wasn't any caf in the Enclave. _At all_. Apparently the Order didn't approve of mind-altering substances, even such a mild stimulant as that. Which, well, _yes_ , annoying, but really it was more their problem than it was hers. If they really wanted to deal with her being snappy and irritable half the day, they could be her fucking guest.

Not that she ended up actually _doing_ much of anything the rest of the day. Immediately after breakfast, she was dragged off to the library, where she was met by Dorak. She got a meandering lecture about how exactly the Enclave's computer system worked. An account was set up for her, through which she would access the archives, though she would be limited to the subjects she had the proper permissions for. (She got the impression quite a lot was forbidden to apprentices, but it hadn't felt tactful to ask directly.) Dorak then gave her a lengthy reading list, along with a schedule going out some weeks — apparently, it was his responsibility to re-educate her in the history and philosophy of the Order.

She didn't anticipate those conversations going very well. It might be better to attempt to lie her way through, but she wasn't certain she could do that consistently enough to be believable.

Dorak wasn't the only one she'd be getting lessons from, though. In their attempt to cram a decade's worth of education into as little time as possible, they'd split subjects three ways. The distractingly familiar Lestin would be responsible for combat training — which, Jedi being Jedi, mostly just involved lightsabers. Tokare would be handling all the Jedi magic stuff which, really, Cina would think _that_ should be the bulk of Jedi education, since it was the only thing about their Order that was truly unique, but apparently not. Looking over the schedule she'd been given, she was actually spending _less_ time with Tokare than with Dorak, and even _Lestin_.

Which was an additional bit of absurdity — didn't Jedi claim to not truly be a martial order at all, more intently focused on other pursuits? Of course, that probably the most widely-recognised characteristic of Jedi was that they carried a particular weapon had already given away the lie, but she'd think they'd at _least_ have the honesty to spend more time on their ridiculous magic shite than waving laser swords around. But Cina didn't know what she was talking about, clearly.

All in all, the explanation of just how they'd be going about her re-education dragged on for what felt like forever. By the time they were done, and Cina was finally being left to her own devices, the sky was already starting to blush with impeding dusk, the chorus of chittering from unseen insects that had dominated during the night starting up. There was really no justification at all for what amounted to Jedi orientation to take _nearly_ that long.

A quick check of the time confirmed she'd cut it _very_ close: the shuttle Asyr (and Onasi) were taking off-world should be leaving in less than an hour. Jedi just never shut up, apparently. Stepping out onto the grounds, it took her a moment to get her bearings — it'd been pitch black out here when she'd come in — before she turned off toward the town, weaving along the path through the gardens.

Just as the gates out of the Enclave came into view ahead, a voice called out to her, sharp and irritatingly familiar. "Where are you going?"

Coming to a stop with a sigh, Cina threw a flat look over her shoulder. "Is that really your business, Shan?"

The younger woman, practically hidden within those ridiculous Jedi robes — honestly, she looked plain strange in those, Cina still hadn't gotten used to it — halted a little further than a polite distance away, eyes narrowed. "You have responsibilities to the Order now."

"I still have other responsibilities. Unless you think I should leave the kids on the ship alone with Kandosa for...however long this is going to take."

"I understand, Cina, that you are..." Shan trailed off, her eyes flicking away for an instant, transparently scrambling for a politic way to put whatever less-than-flattering thing she was thinking. "I know this is still new, to you, but it wouldn't do for you to just—"

"Are you _trying_ to drive me into the Sith again? Because, really, keeping me locked up in the Enclave against my will is probably the quickest way to make me hate you all."

Wow, that was quite an impressive glare. Not very Jedi-ish, that.

Cina didn't bother even trying to stop her eyes from rolling. "Oh, _honestly_ , Shan. I'm not leaving _forever_. I'll be back for my lessons in the morning. But, I think it's best for everyone involved if I sleep on the ship from now on."

"How is that best for everyone?"

"There's caf on the ship. If nothing else, this way I won't end up stabbing Dorak in the neck with a datacard."

Shan gave her a flat, unamused look, clearly not taking that seriously. (Which was just stupid of her, she'd seen what Cina had been like this morning, it wasn't pretty.) But, after a short moment of just staring at her, her eyes tipped away again, shoulders rising and falling with an inaudible sigh. "Fine. But if this becomes a problem, I'll be taking it to the Masters."

"I could hardly expect anything else."

The mild insult went right over Shan's head, of course. With a noisy shuffling of those ridiculous robes, she turned on her heel, stalking off to disappear into the gardens.

Well. That had been...weird. Shan had been strange ever since they'd landed, still not sure how to handle her now.

Whatever, not important at the moment. Cina wandered through the town, heading back toward the primitive excuse for a starport that was apparently all Dantooine had. Once she'd gotten in view of the place, she immediately spotted a ship that hadn't been there before — a tiny commercial skip, she doubted it could have more than twenty seats, the logo of what had to be a shuttle company of some kind emblazoned across the side. (Cina didn't recognise the name, but she hadn't really expected to, there were thousands of the bloody things, and she doubted the big names would bother with charting trips to backwaters like Dantooine.) A little crowd had gathered just off the ramp, presumably passengers saying their goodbyes.

It wasn't difficult to spot her people — Zaalbar was bloody _tall_. She worked her way over, which was much easier than it might have been normally, people kept stepping out of her way, it was weird. (Probably assuming she was a Jedi, since she was wearing Annas's lightsaber openly now, but it was still slightly discomfiting the way they were looking at her.) She walked up just as Mission and Onasi were launching into another argument. A disagreement over how much she could or could not take care of herself, by the sound of it.

She had to wonder if Carth _really_ still thought Mission needed looking after, or if he'd just started a shouting match for the fun of it. That didn't _sound_ like something he'd do, but really, if he hadn't figured out by now that the girl didn't need an adult around he was a bloody idiot.

Of course, Cina _did_ plan to keep an eye on her, but that wasn't because she thought Mission _needed_ someone looking after her. She just wanted to.

Spotting Asyr nearby, close enough to seem a part of their little group but not close enough to necessarily be dragged into the conversation, Cina sidled up next to her. In Harishye, she whispered, "So, how long they be going at it?"

She wouldn't have seen her coming, but Asyr hardly twitched anyway. "Not long. This one isn't so bad. You left me alone with them all day," she added, shooting Cina a glare out of the corner of her eye.

"Oh." Was Asyr trying to say Mission and Onasi had been especially bad since she'd left? Honestly, Cina really hadn't expected that. Not that the two of them would fight — they could hardly tolerate being in the same room for more than a couple minutes — just, Mission had been a bit...withdrawn, since Taris. "Sorry about that. She done moping already?" Not that she didn't have an excellent reason to be moping, of course. "I thought she would take a lot longer than that."

"She would likely have _moped_ by herself the whole day, left to her own devices. The Captain made himself a nuisance."

"How did he do that?"

Asyr let out a harsh huff. (Or just sighed, really, Bothan voices tended to be harsh.) "He tried to convince the kids to leave with us. I believe your questionable fitness as a guardian featured extensively."

"Ah." By _the kids_ Asyr probably meant both of them, Mission and Zaalbar. "Yeah, I can't imagine that going over very well."

"It did not."

"He really is an idiot sometimes, isn't he?"

"Yes. He is."

Right around then, the argument wound down. Well, no, actually, it didn't wind down so much as abruptly stop when Mission realised Cina had appeared at some point. "Cina, there you are! You didn't come back last night, I was worried the Jedi had, I don't know, locked you in a cell or something."

Cina smirked. "They thought about it. They decided to recruit me instead."

Absently frowning to herself, Mission clearly couldn't think of how she was supposed to respond to that. Probably couldn't tell if Cina was being serious or not.

By the look on Onasi's face, he thought she was being completely serious. Which, well, she sort of was...

Their goodbyes ended up being very brief. Onasi _had_ abruptly decided he didn't like her again, and while she'd been gone he'd managed to thoroughly offend Mission. And even Zaalbar, by the set of his shoulders, which was actually rather impressive — Zaalbar was remarkably even-tempered for his age. So it was only a short moment before he was wandering up the ramp, looking firmly ahead with a dark glare.

Cina had no idea if she'd ever see him again. And she really didn't care.

Before he'd even entirely vanished, Asyr was right in front of her. _Right_ in front of her, close enough Cina could smell her. Acting on instinct — Harishye was one of the languages she _did_ remember studying, but she knew far more about Bothans than those (false) memories adequately explained — she turned her face into the side of Asyr's neck, even as Asyr buried her face in her hair. (At least as much of it as she could get in there, Bothans did have long faces and Cina's hair was rather short.) Their hands found their way to the available side of each other's necks, close enough to the same time Cina wasn't sure if she had been cued in somehow, or if some part of her simply knew this was a thing Bothans did.

...Although, now that she thought about it, whoever had made up the Cianen memories hadn't done a great job. She did remember, to use the common euphemism, dating Bothans before Asyr, but they hadn't really acted... Well, they _did_ act like Bothans, just in general, but they _didn't_ act like Bothans in an intimate relationship. Which was a reasonable thing for a Jedi to fuck up, after all, they wouldn't have had any experience in that sort of thing.

Though, really, now she had to wonder what _else_ they'd gotten wrong. It wasn't like she'd gone through Cianen Hayal's life with a fine-toothed comb, and maybe if she did, she could compare the accuracies and inaccuracies to somehow identify the exact Jedi who'd done it...not that she was sure she wanted to. She meant, if it was someone actually at the Enclave — and they would probably have to be, for Cina to have any hope of figuring it out — she would then have to be in that person's presence, possibly with some regularity, which just sounded _unbelievably awkward_ , it was probably best not to—

Cina's train of thought came to an abrupt halt, quite effectively distracted by the claws digging into her neck. Her hand tightening, probably yanking at Asyr's fur a bit (not that she had _any_ right to complain), she drew a hiss in through her teeth. "You are a cruel, _cruel_ woman, Asyr Lar'sym."

A low chuckle set Cina's hair fluttering. "Yes. And yet you like me anyway. What does that say about you?"

"That I'm a shameless masochist, obviously."

"It's good to know these things about yourself." Asyr drew in a long breath — smelling her hair, Cina could tell, it was hardly the first time she'd done it. "Take care of yourself out there."

"You too. If I hear you got yourself killed, I'll be _very_ put out."

"Fortunately, I'm very good at my job."

Well, she wasn't wrong about that. Very few pilots could have managed that crash-landing onto Taris, and some of the shite she'd pulled on that speeder bike extracting Shan...

After a short moment of stillness, Asyr pulled a little away, enough they could actually look at each other, her grip on Cina's neck loosening but not entirely letting go. "You have my com code."

Cina nodded — Asyr would be going right back into the war, so she'd likely be constantly going in and out of com blackouts, but they'd at least be able to get recorded messages through now and again. Though, honestly, she _really_ hadn't expected Asyr to want to stay in contact. Bothans weren't generally given to idle sentiment. A smirk pulling at her lips, Cina said, "Are you going soft on me, Asyr?"

"Truly, I have grown fascinated with the mystery of the Sith with the missing memories. Yet I've only just begun figuring you out — you must tell me when you learn more."

"Ah, I see. It's certainly not because you like me, or anything silly like that."

"No, of course not."

Laughing to herself, Cina tipped up onto her toes — why did _everyone_ have to be taller than her, dammit — and planted a quick little kiss on the tip of Asyr's nose. "It's okay, I won't tell anyone."

Asyr barked out a short, hard guffaw. Letting go of Cina, she stepped away, but not before ruffling a hand through Cina's hair. "Until next time, Professor." A last energetic hug from Mission, a calm wave of farewell to Zaalbar, and Asyr was walking off, disappearing up the ramp a short moment later.

She'd barely been gone a second before Mission was turning to Cina, with an uncertain, peculiarly concerned sort of look. "Are you going to be okay? I mean, I know you and Asyr were..."

Cina smiled. "I'll be fine, _kebin'ika_." With a last glance at the shuttle, she turned away, started off toward where she knew the _Ebon Hawk_ was waiting.

" _Kebinika_?"

" _Kebin, ika_."

"No, I mean, what is that?" Mission's voice came more than slightly churlish.

"What, is Kandosa the only one who gets to come up with Mandoa nicknames for you now?"

"But that's not fair! I don't speak Mandalorian!"

"I guess you'll just have to learn." Honestly, that sounded perfectly reasonable to her. They had five people on the ship now, and three of them spoke Mandoa, one of them exclusively. If she were going to expect Sasha to learn Basic, getting Mission (and Zaalbar) at least passable in Mandoa was only 'fair'.

She could still feel the heat of Mission's pout on the back of her neck, though.

* * *

Cina couldn't sleep.

Not that she could think of any particular reason why that should be. Whoever had outfitted this ship had spared no expense, the crew bunks couldn't reasonably be expected to be any more comfortable than they were. The more noisy systems in the _Hawk_ were all off or on standby, and everyone else had already gone to bed, so there wasn't anything particularly distracting she had to work to ignore — even if there were, Cina hadn't ever found it difficult to sleep through the low noise of a ship in hyperspace. And she was bloody _tired_. It _should_ be a simple matter to just drift off, this shouldn't have taken nearly as long as it apparently was.

Maybe it was that... She still wasn't entirely sure what to call it. That heavy cloud lingering over her, always there. If she were busy, if there was enough going on around her, she could mostly ignore it, hardly even noticed it was there. She _hadn't_ noticed it was there until after she'd woken up on Taris, which was really quite odd when she thought about it. But tonight, lying here alone without Asyr to distract her, with everything that had happened lately, and all the...

She _really_ didn't want to focus on it. That heavy sense of exhaustion, of hopelessness, hitting so hard it was disorienting. Enough she felt she was falling, even with the bed against her back, the ship sitting perfectly still. So thick she couldn't think straight through it, she could hardly move, so thick her chest and throat were tight. Not the same sort of tightness that preceded tears — she couldn't say if anything was going on in her own head that justified getting quite that worked up — it was just... She didn't know, exactly. Overwhelming, too much, she couldn't shake it off.

Or maybe the only thing keeping her up was that persistent feeling she was being watched.

Finally growing fed up with it, Cina turned onto her back, propped herself up on her elbows. "Did you need something, Sasha?"

A short pause, a tiny handful of seconds, and the peculiar Mandoade girl faded into existence — crouched over the bed, her face only inches from Cina's. She jumped, jerking away from the girl, her heart unreasonably hard in her throat.

Once she had control over her voice again, Cina muttered, "Dammit, kid, do we need to have a conversation about personal space?"

Sasha's eyes narrowed, her head tilting slightly with obvious confusion. Which, Cina couldn't entirely blame her for that, she wasn't certain _personal space_ was even a thing to Mandoade. (Their language had the words to say it, of course, but she wasn't sure it actually meant anything to Sasha.) For a few long seconds, Sasha just stared at her. Then, in her thin, harsh voice, weakened from a year of not using it at all, she whispered, "You left."

In a way, Cina was almost surprised. She wouldn't have expected Sasha to... Well, she'd been on her own so long, she hadn't had anyone around who even knew she _existed_ in what must have felt like forever, she hadn't thought Sasha would _care_ if Cina wasn't around anymore. At least, not so soon after meeting her. Though, perhaps she should have, now that she thought about it — people with nothing tend to be proportionately protective of what little they do have, and Cina _had_ promised she'd be looking after Sasha whether she wanted her to or not, if not in so many words.

But more than that, she was... Well, it was sort of heartbreaking, wasn't it? The kid had lost _everything_ , and while it wasn't obvious on her face, there was a clear note of vulnerability on her voice, of accusation, of... Whatever it was, Cina wasn't so heartless she wasn't affected by it at all, that dark weight only grew heavier, too heavy, that inexplicable tension in her chest growing so hard she felt she had to scream, or cry, or just...just do _something_ , anyway, she didn't know what the fuck was wrong with her.

Or what the fuck she was supposed to do now. She was completely unequipped to deal with... _this_ , this traumatised orphan kid _thing_ , she was lost here. "Well... I came back."

Sasha just kept staring at her. She didn't move a muscle, hardly even seemed to breathe, just...staring.

"I will have to go out and do things occasionally, I might even be away for days at a time, but I _will_ always come back." Assuming she didn't get herself killed or something, anyway. A note of reluctant humour entering her voice, she added, "This _is_ my ship you're living on, you know."

Sasha's eyes narrowed, the slightest hint of a suspicious glare. "You promise." It wasn't really a question — though, if it _weren't_ a question, Cina couldn't say exactly what that was supposed to be.

"Sure, kid, you have my word." As much worth as her word had, since she had evidently been a traitor to the Republic and all. (Not that she really _felt_ like a traitor, she assumed most traitors didn't.) "Now, unless there was anything else, I really _do_ need to get to sleep. You can go ahead and take one of the beds in here, by the way. I'm not going to _make_ you, if you're more comfortable in the hold go right ahead, but you really don't need to sleep in there anymore." Without waiting for a response — she didn't really expect one — Cina laid back down and turned over, forcefully directing her mind back to the futile effort to sleep.

Sasha didn't leave, Cina could still feel her there, but her presence was far less distracting now. Cina really couldn't claim to understand how this Force shite worked, but probably because Sasha was less directly focused on her. That seemed reasonable. It was at least less distracting enough Cina _finally_ started drifting off.

Some minutes later, she couldn't begin to guess exactly how many, Sasha finally moved. Cautiously, as though afraid of...something, couldn't say what, she tipped onto the bed, crawled over Cina while somehow managing to not touch her at all, so slowly and gently the bed hardly shifted. By the feel of it, Sasha tucked herself away far to the inside, on the very edge of the bunk against the wall of the ship.

The increasingly familiar weight of inexplicable despair smothering her all over again, Cina never did get much sleep that night.

* * *

[diode strips] — _The real-world equivalent would be strips of LED lights. (Think the lines of dim lights some movie theaters use to outline the features of the floor and lead to the doors.) The technology wouldn't be exactly the same, but the principle would be very similar._

Cina's reaction to Zhar — _Zhar Lestin was Alek's master in his padawan days, as was mentioned in previous flashbacks, and he was also along for Lesami and Alek's fact-finding expedition out into the rim before the war with the Mandalorians. They would have known each other quite well._

[She'd had no idea _any_ of the Revanchists had returned to the Jedi] — _Vandar was obviously talking about Meetra, but the number of people who know about her return and subsequent exile are actually very few. The Council decided to keep it to themselves, for morale concerns. The official line is that she's MIA, along with many other Jedi whose bodies were never recovered, or simply vanished after the war. With the absurd number of humans there are in the galaxy, and the comparatively limited possible variation in facial features, nobody has actually recognised Meetra, so the official story has stuck. (Not to mention she mostly hangs around frontier rim worlds, so surveillance is very unlikely to spot her and start a frenzy.)_

[ _eight (uh, five)_ ] — _The year on Zeltros is significantly shorter than the standard year. Thinking back to when he was very young, Sesai still reflexively uses Zeltrosian years, he had to correct himself. At this point, anyway, he drops this habit eventually._

Harishye — _Um, as a reminder, that's what I called the standardised language in Bothan space. It only came up once, apparently, ages ago._

 _kebin'ika_ — _Mando'a. Formed from canon "blue" (_ kebiin) _and what appears to be a diminutive suffix of some kind. (It's also used in_ ad'ika _, which is an affectionate way of saying "kid", and_ cyar'ika _, which is translated "darling" or "sweetheart".) The shortening of the vowel (_ keb **ii** n _-_ » keb **i** n'ika _) is inspired by the canon term doing the same thing (_ ad **ii** k _-_ » *ad **i** k'ika _-_ » ad' **i** ka _). At least, I assume it's from_ adiik _, that would make the most sense. Dropping the repeated_ ik _is just the sort of thing people do to make words easier to say._

* * *

 _Yes, I still exist. This delay is for the same reasons as have been explained before — medical issues, depression-induced writer's block, focusing on **All According to Plan** — with the addition of actually having a job again. So there's that. I do think I'm finally starting to adjust, **maybe** , but I really can't promise anything._

 _It is odd that Sesai keeps turning up in those flashbacks. I'm sure that won't have any relevance in the near future whatsoever._


	13. Drawing Lines — III

Cina was drawn away from sleep, fitfully, reluctantly.

For long, innumerable moments, she lay there, not truly thinking, not truly anything. She felt all too heavy, all too, too _tired_. She didn't want to be awake, she really, _really_ didn't.

It was only when, thoughts bouncing idly from thing to thing with no real direction, that she stumbled on the damn Jedi, her scheduled lessons, that she... Well, no, she didn't _want_ to get up, exactly. Some part of her, something dark and seductive and so _tired_ , would be perfectly content to stay here and never, ever get up. (Though, "content" wasn't precisely the right word, but the sentiment was close enough.) But she wouldn't be allowed to. If she didn't show up for her re-education, the Jedi would surely come track her down eventually, and she just knew after that they'd be even more insufferable than they were on an ordinary day. So she had to get up.

Unfortunately.

Her eyes focused rather more slowly than they should, even _they_ were bloody tired. The first thing she saw was Sasha, sleeping curled up against the wall of the ship — that looked rather awkward, actually, Cina couldn't imagine it was in any way comfortable. She almost looked like a normal kid at the moment, cleaned up and the matted mess her hair had been chopped down to a bare couple inches, wearing actual clothes, for once not painfully tense, asleep relaxed in a way Cina hadn't seen her yet.

Only _almost_ : she still had that knife Cina had let her have when she'd been cutting her hair, glinting blade peeking through her folded arms, hugged close to her chest.

This wasn't making Cina feel any less horrid.

Each tiniest movement feeling about ten times more difficult than it should, her own body feeling all too _heavy_ , she was so bloody _tired_ , Cina levered herself out of bed. Slowly, gently, doing her best not to disturb Sasha. Honestly, she didn't expect to succeed — she assumed the girl had been sleeping very lightly for some time, ready to hide herself away again at an instant's notice — but, by some miracle, by the time she was on her feet Sasha was still sleeping. Cina stepped out into the hall to get dressed, so the clinking of her belt wouldn't wake the poor girl up.

Cina wasn't entirely surprised to find, walking into the main body of the ship, that she was apparently the last one up. At least, she was pretty sure those occasional clanks had to be Kandosa poking around in the hold, she couldn't imagine what else. Mission was at the table, tapping away at something — it was impossible to guess what that girl got up to, and honestly it didn't particularly matter, she could just go ahead and entertain herself — Zaalbar doing something in the kitchen — Cina really hadn't the familiarity to tell what he was working on at this stage.

An absent sort of frown pulled at her face. There was an inconsistency in the Cianen Hayal story she hadn't even noticed until now: she was _positive_ someone with her background should know how to cook worth a damn, but Cina really, _really_ didn't. That was a curious oversight, now that she thought about it. Eh, not important.

"What time is it, anyway?"

Mission jumped, something clinking loud enough Cina could hear it from here. "Cina! Uh..." A couple absent blinks, and Mission glanced down at her pad again. "Eight seventeen."

"Shite. I'm supposed to meet Dorak in the library at nine thirty." Grumbling curses under her breath — in Iridon, apparently, which...okay? — Cina made straight for the caf machine, flipping the thing on. Like everything else on this ship, Kang had been considerate enough to have a rather nice one set up and waiting for her. How thoughtful of him.

The grinder was pretty loud, of course. Cina winced, both at the twinge flaring through her head and just the noise in general. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the hall leading to where Sasha was still (hopefully) sleeping. Would she hear that all the way over there? Kandosa wasn't being exactly quiet himself, but he was further away, and this thing was fucking grating, it probably carried better, and the girl was certainly used to living on a hair trigger. If she'd realised she was just going to wake Sasha up anyway she wouldn't have put near as much effort into being quiet...

Hardly twenty seconds later, Sasha came charging into the room. Her wide eyes found Cina immediately, pinning her with an uncomfortably intense stare — but, after a second, the tension bled out of her, seeming to relax (if only marginally).

"Oh, hi there!"

The girl jumped at the surprised shout from Mission, then disappeared again, blink and she was gone.

"It's okay, Sasha." Setting the thing to brew a sizeable mug for her, she stepped away, aiming a beckoning wave in the direction she was nearly positive Sasha was. "Mission won't hurt you. Come over here and introduce yourself."

Mission got up, coming around the table toward Cina, every movement slow and careful, a soft smile on her face. (She wasn't looking anywhere near where Sasha was, but she was trying, anyway.) Zaalbar stayed where he was, which was probably a good idea — Wookiees were far more physically intimidating, it was better he didn't stand up right now. The faint flicker at the edge of her perception that was Sasha curved around the edge of the room, staying nearly as far from Mission as physically possible, then darted in, coming to a stop directly behind Cina.

The sudden flood of light and heat from so nearby made Cina jump — she really hoped she got used to this ridiculous Force-augmented awareness she'd gotten stuck with lately, it could get a bit unnerving. Forcing a smile onto her own face she said, "The blue one is Mission, and the big hairy one is Zaalbar. They're good people, friends of mine." The word Cina used literally meant _siblings_ , not _friends_ , but that was a conscious decision — "vod" could be used for people one wasn't related to, it just implied a closer relationship with a greater degree of mutual trust. "Come on out and say hello, they won't hurt you."

It did take a few seconds more convincing, but Sasha ultimately did stop trying to hide behind her legs. (Sticking behind her like that was kind of silly, she was _completely invisible_ , honestly.) Mission crouched as low as she comfortably could, nearly bringing her down to her knees, her head slightly under Sasha's — Cina was mildly surprised, it seemed Mission had more experience with children than she'd assumed — even stumbling over a little basic Mandoa at Cina's direction. Turned out, Sasha did know a tiny bit of Basic, barely enough to introduce herself. (She started with the full _Vesaisa be-Sulem_ , but amended it with _Sasha_ on her own a second after.) Zaalbar acknowledged her with a nod and a pleasant grumble, but had the grace to stay sitting and keep his response to a couple words — Sasha was _very_ skittish, just those couple words in his deep, rumbling voice already had her diving behind Cina again.

Cina thought this was the longest she'd seen Sasha stay fully visible so far. She stuck around through the entirety of breakfast — though she didn't sit at the table with them, snatching biscuits and ducking back behind Cina's chair. This seemed like something she should be taking as a good sign, but she wasn't entirely sure whether it was significant enough to be considered proper progress.

Now that she thought about it, Sasha spending the night in Cina's bed with her, despite that she'd kept as much distance between them as physically possible, was probably a much bigger deal than this right here. She apparently trusted Cina enough to sleep, and thus leave herself extremely vulnerable, in her immediate presence, not hidden at all. Sure, Sasha had slept with that knife she'd let her have, but still, that seemed like it should be a huge step.

 _Should_ , because Cina wasn't positive — she hadn't studied psychology, especially abnormal psychology, very deeply, she was mostly just guessing here.

At least...she didn't _think_ she had, anyway.

Before long, Cina _really_ had to get going, if she didn't want to be late. Ordinarily, she might consider showing up a few minutes late, just to subtly express her disdain for the intellectual footing of the Order in general, but that sounded like a bad idea. An amusing one, yes, but probably not worth it.

It still took some long convincing to get herself to stand up. She was just so _tired_...

She'd gotten halfway through the little town — this early in the morning, the place was nearly as quiet and empty as it'd been in the middle of the night — before she realised she wasn't alone. Jerking to a halt in the street, Cina turned to stare into the seemingly empty space a few metres behind her. "I can feel you back there, Sasha."

"How do you do that?" The girl's voice drifted out of nothingness, a soft whisper barely above the edge of hearing. "Nobody else can find me."

Cina shrugged. "Jedi things."

"You're not a Jedi."

"Not exactly, no." That was far too complicated to be explaining to a child as young as Sasha in the little time she had...though she did have to wonder why Sasha sounded so sure about that. Maybe she'd just been eavesdropping during that argument with Onasi, whatever the others had said about her when she hadn't been listening. "But that's not important. You should go back and wait on the ship."

Sasha didn't say anything. But she didn't move either, still standing there invisible, just out of arm's reach.

With a heavy sigh, Cina said, "I can tell you're still there, you know."

"You left."

"Yes, well..." She struggled to decided how the fuck she was supposed to respond to that for a few seconds. "I did come back. And I'll come back tonight too. I thought we talked about this."

"Yes. I'm making sure."

Despite herself, Cina couldn't help smiling a little. "You're adorable, really, but I'm not sure that's a good idea. The Jedi are teaching me their magic, that's where I'm going right now. There will be a lot of them around."

"That Jedi on the ship couldn't find me."

That...was a very good point, actually. Not only had Shan not been able to _find_ Sasha, she hadn't even realised she _existed_ , had clearly had serious doubts whether Cina was telling the truth about her. (Which was silly, why would she lie about that?) Shan was supposedly a fully-trained, competent Jedi, and she hadn't felt Sasha at all. She had no idea why not, exactly how whatever Cina was doing to spot her differed from what Jedi normally did, but it was _possible_ all the Jedi at the Enclave would be just as blind to her presence as Shan had been.

Though bringing her along still seemed like a terribly stupid idea.

Or, now that she thought about it, what was so terribly stupid about it? Sure, some of the Jedi might notice Sasha, but surely they wouldn't do anything that bad if they did. It might take some explaining, exactly how they reacted in those first seconds might freak Sasha out a bit, but...

Cina sighed. "Fine, whatever. Let's go, then. I'm going to be late at this rate."

Sasha was still invisible, but Cina was certain she was grinning at her anyway.

* * *

"And you realise that doesn't make any bloody sense at all, of course."

Sitting with legs folded on one of the twisting roots of the tree in the middle of the Enclave, Tokare opened one overlarge eye a slit to shoot her a level look. "It is as it is, Apprentice."

Cina barely managed to hold in a scoff.

Many people all around the galaxy had serious issues with the Jedi, the more innocuous ones including their drive to keep their secrets, their tendency toward doublespeak and riddles. It turned out this wasn't just something they did with outsiders, but even their own members. The secret-keeping she'd already run into — beside seriously restricting her access to the library, they wouldn't even tell her _her own real name_. (She hadn't pressed the point, still wasn't certain she wanted to know, but they _had_ said they would never tell her who she'd been before they'd remade her.) Their inability to speak plainly and get to the bloody point, though, Tokare was giving her a master class in that.

Not trying as hard to keep the derision off her voice as she probably should, Cina drawled, "So, the trick to this Force thing is to just...do nothing." Tokare hadn't put it like that himself, obviously, but that was what he'd meant by that long, directionless, empty ramble.

His expression didn't twitch in the slightest, but it was still clear to her that he didn't much like her characterisation of his 'wisdom'.

Sasha did though, a spot in the empty air behind her and to her right frothing with a sense of low-boiling amusement. Which, inexplicably, Tokare didn't seem to feel at all — he had turned a thoughtful, confused sort of stare in Sasha's general direction when Cina had joined him on the bloody dirt under this damn tree, but he'd ultimately dismissed whatever he might be able to pick up. Which implied he hadn't picked up much at all. None of the Jedi in the Enclave had reacted to Sasha's presence, they'd been here for hours and nobody had noticed, it was really bloody weird.

If Cina wasn't _sensing her through the Force_ , if Sasha's camouflage really was just that good, then how the fuck was she doing it?

But anyway, she was _supposed_ to be meditating. That was pretty much what Tokare's instruction had boiled down to. There'd been a lot of circular babbling about centres and illusions and connectedness and some such nonsense, how she could only hear whispers from the Force when she was quiet herself, she could only touch it when she detached from the physical, could only know its will when her own was suppressed. Blah blah, spiritual nonsense, blah.

Cina had honestly had trouble keeping a straight face. No wonder they insisted on getting them young — nobody used to thinking for themselves could possibly take any of this seriously.

But anyway, she could... _try_ to do that, she guessed. She didn't at all expect to succeed. Maybe there was some kind of trick to it, but she didn't think it was possible to just...shut her brain off. She simply didn't work that way, never had. But she might as well try. Tokare was supposedly an expert in this magic shite, after all.

Cina sat there with her eyes closed, trying to empty herself of all thought and feeling, for maybe two minutes before giving it up as a bad job. She just...couldn't _not_ think about things. If nothing else, she ended up watching the random blotches of moody colour her brain filled her empty sight with, wondering if there were any pattern to it or if it were just random noise from the constant firing of millions of nerve cells. There was no point trying to suppress it, it was simply impossible.

Not to mention, that bleak exhaustion hovering over her took the opportunity of even a moment's quiet to fall all the heavier. So, even if she _could_ stop thinking, she'd just end up feeling instead. Feeling really bloody _miserable_.

So, no, she wouldn't be doing that.

But she _had_ been able to do all this Jedi shite before. They might have repressed her memory, but it wasn't like they could fundamentally change how her brain worked — according to Lestin, who had known her before, her personality was even more or less the same. The person she'd been before _must_ have had some trick, her own way of doing it. She meant, really, she'd been able to do this Jedi magic shite since she'd been a small child, long before she'd been given away, before she'd known a thing about how the Jedi went about it. There had to be another way.

When she thought about it, it wasn't just her, what Tokare was saying _didn't_ entirely make sense. There was no real reason she should have to be empty or detached or whatever such silliness — wasn't she already _connected_ to the Force just by virtue of...being alive? She was pretty sure that was how this worked. And, she was clearly _touching_ it at some level all the time, what with the uncomfortable sixth sense she'd picked up lately. (Hers didn't seem to work the same as the Jedi's, but it _had_ to be through silly magic shite, how else?) And she _certainly_ hadn't been empty of thought or feeling when she'd squished those four people back on Taris. So, yeah, calling out his shite on that one.

She was pretty sure he was _wrong_ , but that didn't actually help her figure out what the fuck to do. Maybe she should...just...focus on it? And try to... She wasn't sure what, really...

It _was_ sort of a daunting prospect to begin with. The extreme awareness of her surroundings she'd suddenly picked up was...rather uncomfortable at times. At one level, it was just sort of _a lot_ — the brain was designed to process only so much information at once, and she couldn't _turn the bloody thing off_ , it got really distracting. She'd gotten into the habit, very quickly, to just...ignore much of it, most of the time. Like any other sense, she guessed, people didn't actively pay attention to absolutely every little detail they were perceiving at any one time — something might jump out and distract them, but focus was usually selective. The weird picking up feelings thing was much harder to ignore — with Onasi gone, the _Hawk_ was suddenly _much_ quieter, she was far more at ease without his distrust and anger pinching at her skin — but the more tactile angle, the awareness of her physical surroundings, that could be focused as anything else. It was sort of analogous to a long-range sense of touch, after all, and it wasn't like she was entirely aware of the normal one all the time either.

But maybe if she, just, did the exact _opposite_ of ignoring it...

Closing her eyes, her face pulling into a light frown, Cina tried to turn toward that weird sixth sense she still didn't have perfectly adequate language to describe. Just closing her eyes immediately brought it more into focus than it'd been a moment ago. The most intense thing in her immediate surroundings was Tokare himself, hot and pulsing, little sparks of energy running up her ethereal fingers down through her spine, she needed to repress a shiver. Like a bright light in darkness, he spilled out past himself, a cloud of soft power obscuring everything within a couple feet of him, gradually fading away the further she looked. She tried to ignore him — if she focused directly on him she'd probably end up accidentally reading his mind or something, which was not the purpose of this exercise — but it was more difficult than she'd expect, his brilliant warmth drawing the eye.

She finally did manage to turn away, spreading herself out around them. There was the dirt broken by twisting roots, transitioning to grass after a few feet behind her, the tree stretching up, branches weaving together as they stretched overhead, leaves fluttering in the breeze. She did her best not to focus on any one individual blade of grass, any one leaf, instead touching each at one, gripping them from every angle, surrounding it all.

Her left temple starting to throb a bit, biting her lip, she pushed further, extending this odd awareness of hers further out than it naturally sat. She knew the tile of the walkpaths carving through and around the little garden at the centre of the Enclave, flashes of warmth as she spilled over one Jedi and another and another, she pushed further, feeling the outside walls of the structure in all directions, then further, the shape and texture of the inside, the roof, not just the physical but the jittering sparks of electricity rushing through in sparking filaments, all the Jedi, dozens of them, bright and hot and completely impossible to miss, filling the air with a murky glowing soup.

As she pushed further, that whatever the fuck that was only grew brighter, hotter, not just exuded by the Jedi but threaded through them, echoing across them all as though bound together through ties unseen. It wasn't just the Jedi, she noticed as she pushed further, but it burned through the gardens as well, if somewhat less brightly, all the plants and the insects and the more intense flickers of animals of some kind, the same echoes pinging through them, a pulse carried from somewhere outside them all, carried through all all at once, an echo that grew louder and louder the further she pushed herself outward.

She didn't even notice the echo start burning through her before it was too late to do anything about it.

— _bucked under her feet, bringing her to her knees, her head nearly slammed into the lip of the table, she pushed herself back up, teetering as the ship tilted around her—_

— _Lords in their dramatic, absurd, overdone robes, the air about them quivering with hatred and fear in equal measure, but the fear slowly won out, they sank to their knees before her and—_

— _was laughing, suddenly and sharply, a note of shock in the sound, surprised by himself, but he positively burned to her eyes, his delight overpowering any sense of—_

"— _can't do this!" the woman shouted, eyes sharp with despair, "It wasn't supposed to end this—"_

— _breaking up, shuddering and cracking against unrelenting pressure, even as the heat tore into her she was still reaching out—_

— _smiled at her, the expression rather eerie with the blood splashed across her face, but she didn't care, at the moment she could only feel relieved, she was safe, she'd told the bloody idiot not to follow her, but she was—_

— _I KNOW YOU—_

— _up her skirt, and she pulled him closer, fingers tight in his hair, the stiffness of his cock against her hip bringing a smirk to her face—_

— _burned into her side, but it didn't matter, she'd take him with her, a portion of the energy from the lightsaber transmuted into fire even as it cut into her, bright flames spilling from her fingers, his head and chest vanished in the conflagration—_

— _tears running down her face, collapsing to her knees, looking somehow smaller in her ridiculous black and silver getup, staring up at her, pleading, "I don't know what to do, I don't know—"_

— _started to sigh, and she felt the smile touch her lips, it was—_

— _falling from the sky, red and green and black, the ground shook with each impact, wind burning with—_

Cina started back to herself, and was instantly overwhelmed with the blinding agony that had filled her skull, hot and sharp, for long seconds she could only clench her fingers around her own head, shivering with each stuttering breath.

Slowly, the firey knife was pulled away, inch by inch, until she was left with only a tight throbbing over her left ear. Though the by now familiar headache wasn't the only lasting effect of her little episode — she felt oddly shaky, weak, as though she'd just run for miles, flushed and sweaty. It was a few long moments, taking careful breaths through her raw throat, that she finally noticed the smell of bile.

Apparently letting that echo into her gave her a serious bloody headache and made her vomit all over herself. And this was a basic thing Jedi were supposed to do all the time. Awesome.

Still feeling a bit unsteady, her fingers shaking, she pushed herself back upright, the motion making her head swim. Tokare was still sitting exactly where he'd been, a few of the Jedi walking by had stopped to stare, but nobody had done anything about her little episode — not that she expected there was anything anyone could have done about it. (She _was_ a little surprised Sasha had stayed hidden, could still feel her hovering over her shoulder.) That was definitely an expression he was having, though. Cina couldn't say exactly what kind of expression, something heavy, and tight. Something in the family of concern, if not quite the same thing.

It took a couple seconds for Cina to find her voice. "Yeah, let's not do that again." Her voice came out harsh, thin.

For a long moment, Tokare just stared at her, fixing her with unblinking, overlarge eyes. "You had a vision."

"Sort of a lot of them at once, I think." Shaking her head, she rubbed at that spot over her left ear, then jerked her hand away with a wince — that was _not_ making it feel better. "It was bloody confusing. Also, really fucking hurt."

"Mm." Tokare let out a soft sigh, that heavy expression shifting to something softer, more distant. "I had hoped this would not happen."

Cina frowned. "Wait, what?"

"According to your first instructors at the Temple on Coruscant, you never took to meditation well. This is not entirely unheard of — to those more powerful in the Force, looking too deep into it can be overwhelming at times. We're told it only grew worse as you aged, until you began to avoid it whenever possible. Master Zhar claims to be unable to recall the last time he saw you surrender yourself to the Force entirely."

It would have taken more energy to keep her annoyance off her face than she had available at the moment. Tokare knew full well she might have reacted badly to this meditation shite he wanted her to do, but he'd _made her do it anyway?_ Seriously, what the _fuck?_

He could obviously tell she was annoyed with him, a faintly disapproving look taking over his face. "Do mind yourself, Apprentice."

Of course, she wasn't _supposed_ to actually get annoyed with people doing that kind of thing to her — or _anything_ , really. _There is no emotion_ , and all that. She kept glaring at him anyway.

"It was believed that the ill effects your previous self experienced were largely due to an inability to surrender her ego to the will of the Force, even temporarily, even superficially. We hoped you might have better luck now. It appears we were mistaken."

That wasn't making her any _less_ annoyed. Oh, well, _obviously_ she should have better luck _surrendering her ego_ if she were completely aware her entire identity was _fictional_ — she shouldn't have any attachment to it at all, then, should she? Ignore for the moment this apparently happened to some people just by nature, no, that wasn't a real consideration at all. It certainly couldn't be that she thought the very idea of needing to _surrender her ego_ to do their stupid magic shite was absurd in the first place. It certainly couldn't be that _surrendering one's ego_ was meaningless, spiritualist nonsense, a concept that made _absolutely no sense_ , it was _bloody impossible_. None of that mattered, it couldn't possibly go wrong this time!

Yes, it would likely end up being one of the most seriously unpleasant experiences of her life, but it was worth it! We might be able to properly brainwash her this time! Have her give it a go, just in case!

Jedi 'compassion' at work. Sadistic bastards...

Cina tried to suppress her anger, at least enough nobody would notice it — Tokare didn't look any more annoyed with her than he'd been a second ago, so it was probably working. "Right, well, let's go ahead and give me a failing grade on the spiritual side of this Jedi magic stuff, and just move on. Because I'm _not_ doing that again."

He did look rather less than happy, but he give her a slow nod, apparently willing to accept that for the moment.

"Okay. I'm going to go clean up."

At least he had the decency to not try to continue the lesson while she was covered in her own sick. She realised she must already have an extremely negative opinion of the Jedi at this point, lower than even she'd thought, to be willing to give Tokare credit for meeting such a low standard of decency. But as far as she was concerned, they _really_ hadn't done anything to redeem themselves to her so far. Which, honestly, was just...

If she were in their position, she would be being as nice and accommodating to the one in her position as possible. Seemed to her, being arses was just making it _more_ likely she'd turn on them again, which, she'd been under the impression that was the _exact opposite_ of what they wanted. Not that she was planning to do a full one-eighty on them, Alek needed to die, she was just saying, their treatment of her certainly appeared to be a strategic error.

They were, plainly, sabotaging themselves. If she didn't think she needed to to secure her future freedom, she wouldn't even bother with this charade, she would have already left. And, so far, these last couple days, they'd somehow only managed to make it worse.

That she was simply never going to become a good little Jedi no matter how nice and accommodating they were was quite beside the point.

* * *

 _Sesai wasn't really listening to whatever it was the Jedi lady was saying. He could feel all the eyes on him, two dozen strangers staring him down, it was hard to focus on anything else. He tried to hold back the urge to cringe away, he could hear his_ shani _telling him he was fine, he was safe, there was nothing to be afraid of, but that didn't help at all, because he'd been taken away, he'd never see them again, and remembering her voice just made him want to cry, but he couldn't, not in front of everyone, and—_

 _Without really meaning to do it, he pushed out of himself, forcing a feeling out into the world. He wasn't interesting, they didn't care, there was no particular reason to pay him any attention, they could just ignore the Jedi lady until the actual lesson started. He didn't matter, they didn't care, they didn't have to look. In a brief handful of seconds, he felt the compulsion take, their attention wandering, most of the eyes on him drifting away. Some of the tension went out of his shoulders, he let out a relieved sigh._

 _But not_ all _of them. He'd noticed, when the Jedi had been talking to his family, that they didn't have much trouble influencing the Jedi, at least a little bit. Even he could — the older Jedi if they weren't looking for it, and the kids were easy. He didn't know why that was. It was commonly believed that his people's_ inasi pen shaja _worked through the Force somehow, but Jedi stuff... It was almost like it was at a different level, like their stuff went under Jedi stuff, or around it or something, that they didn't directly touch each other. Most Jedi he'd run into so far, they hardly even seemed to notice it was happening, few could shrug it off entirely._

 _But one of the kids in the classroom, when his compulsion reached their mind, it turned hard and slick, the feeling sliding right off it. And he felt their attention only grow stronger, feeling more like a glare than idle curiosity, irritated even._

 _He took a moment to spot who this mind belonged to — a human-looking girl, a couple years older than him, toward the back of the class. Staring back at him, her eyes narrowed. He couldn't pick up anything from her directly, her feelings held back from the world, but he could hear the echo around her. Anger and frustration and a pungent hint of hatred, beneath it all a tight thread of hurt, of betrayal. It wasn't pleasant, of course, but..._

 _Sesai smiled._

 _All through the lesson, he could hardly summon the effort to pay attention. His gaze kept being drawn back to the girl, the one Jedi kid he'd met who could see on his level. (Not to mention she actually_ felt _things, most Jedi didn't seem to feel a whole lot, like droids made of flesh, it was downright creepy.) He kept poking at her mind, pushing in feelings of amusement, of comfort, of glee, but none of it got through, skipping off much as his first compulsion had, only serving to make the girl more and more annoyed with him, glaring back sharper and hotter._

 _He should probably stop, but he just couldn't help himself. It'd been too long since he'd run into a real person._

 _When the math class was let out — Sesai hadn't heard a word, which would probably come back to bite him later, but oh well — the girl jumped to her feet, rushed away from him for the door. He noticed their classmates step out of her way, seemingly on reflex, instinctively avoiding the forbidding echo around her. But Sesai didn't mind, he sprang after her, catching up a few meters down the hall._

 _Coming up behind her, Sesai pounced, taking one of her arms with both of his. A bounce in his voice he'd thought he'd permanently lost, he chirped, "Hi! My name's Sesai, what's yours?"_

 _The girl jerked to a halt, glared down at him. "Let go of me, Rhysa."_

 _He frowned. "Rhysa?"_

 _His confusion just seemed to be making her confused. "Your last name?"_

" _Um, I don't have a last name." Zeltrosi didn't, as a rule._

 _The girl stared at him, slowly blinking. Then, the walls holding her mind back slid aside, but it didn't stay put — her thoughts pushed forward, quickly, far too quickly for him to react, and_ sharp _, sliding into his own, cutting deep inside. He flinched at the intrusion, but it didn't hurt really. Felt_ weird _, and it was making him kinda dizzy, and it was hard to think for a moment as he felt the girl go right for his memories, his knowledge of his own language, digging around, looking for—_

 _When the girl abruptly pulled herself away, he went far too lightheaded, knees shaking. If he weren't still holding on to her, he'd probably be on the floor right now._

" _Huh. Zeltrosi kinship is damn weird, but alright." She wasn't speaking Basic anymore — she must have copied Anasheja straight from his head, she had the same accent and everything. "_ Mhe Rhysei _, then. Leave me the hell alone,_ mhe Rhysei _."_

 _The girl tried to pull away, but he clung all the harder, a grin pulling at his face. "Did you just copy Anasheja right out of my head? Can Jedi even_ do _that?"_

 _She groaned, eyes tipping up to the ceiling. "I can, so probably. Do you mind?"_

" _Of course I don't mind, that's just awesome. Besides, nobody here speaks Anasheja, it's nice. Could you teach me how to do that?"_

" _No, I meant, let_ go _." With the word, Sesai felt the now familiar crackle of power pouring in from nowhere, and his hands were ripped off her arm by invisible claws, pushing him away. The girl turned, started off down the hall._

 _She'd only made it a few steps before he grabbed her again. "You didn't tell me your name, you know. That's just rude."_

" _Oh, and clinging all over me isn't?"_

 _Sesai frowned. "Well...no?" Honestly, what the hell kind of crazy person would consider_ hugging someone _rude? Off-worlders were just damn strange sometimes._

" _It's Lesami. There, you know my name. Leave me alone now?"_

" _Nope!" he chirped. She glared at him some more, but he just grinned back. "Your the first Jedi I've met who's actually a real person. Everyone else here is flat and empty and...still. It's damn creepy, is what that is. It's too cold here, but you're warm," he said, shoving his face into her shoulder, "it's nice."_

 _Her frustration set the air to bubbling, but Sesai didn't much care. Because this Lesami was real, he could feel it, she was actually_ here _, he couldn't stop smiling._

 _Meeting her was totally worth being flung into a wall a few seconds later._

* * *

Just off the courtyard in the middle of the Enclave, the one with that bloody tree Tokare always insisted on having their inane lessons under, there was a little refectory. Much of the ceiling and the west wall, looking into the courtyard, was glass, the ceramic tiled surfaces and cheap steel furnishings gleaming in the midday sun. Most of the kitchen staff appeared to be Jedi — mostly younger apprentices, though she caught sight of an adult here or there — a duty she assumed was assigned on rotation or something.

Curiously, the place never did get very full. Cina thought there was maybe enough space to seat sixty or so, but most days they didn't even number twenty (that including the kitchen staff). She knew the Dantooinian Jedi had been hit hard in the Great Sith War — Exar Kun had been trained at this very Enclave, much of his generation leaving with him — but that had been some decades ago now, she'd have thought that was enough to time to recover at least somewhat. Perhaps much of the population was out on the rim, involved in the war with the Empire. She couldn't think of any better explanation.

It was a risk, spending more time around the Jedi than she really had to, every second an opportunity for her control to slip and give away that she wasn't nearly as sanguine about the whole mind rape thing as she was trying to pretend. Not to mention Sasha did sort of need to eat too. But, after a bit of wavering, she'd decided to just take lunch here. Having to trek all the way to the ship and back was a tedious waste of time.

And, well, Sasha could take care of herself just fine. Cina's lessons had started a week ago now, Sasha insisting on tailing her the whole while, but nobody had noticed the sneaky little girl yet, even with her slipping into the kitchens to nick food. Once, Cina had spotted her swiping a roll _right off a Jedi's plate_ , and the woman hadn't even noticed — she'd blinked at her lunch in apparent surprise for a long moment before visibly shrugging it off. Watching these little tricks Sasha played, Cina eventually came to realise she wasn't _just_ making herself and everything she was touching invisible. When she did something big, like stealing that roll, it came with an odd shiver on the air, a sense of _nothing to see here_ , _things are as they should be_. It only worked on some of the Jedi, the compulsion turned aside, like waves lapping against stone, but even the resistant Jedi didn't seem to find it particularly suspicious. And Sasha remembered who it worked on and who it didn't, never targeted anyone resistant a second time. A week surrounded by Jedi, stealing shite and poking at their heads all the while, and nobody had spotted her yet. Which was just...

It was just bloody impressive, was what that was. Especially since Sasha had never had any sort of proper education in how this Jedi magic shite was supposed to work. (Though she was getting some now, of course, eavesdropping on Cina's lessons.) True, this talent of hers had been developed through trauma, a desperate need to _not be found_ , Cina wouldn't be surprised if people could pull off all kinds of insane things through wild instinct. But it was still impressive.

As usual, once she had her food — invariably simple and bland fare, but she hadn't expected anything else — she found a spot off in a corner, putting as much of the largely empty room between herself and the rest of the Jedi as possible. If she sat too close to anyone they made a point of asking her uncomfortable questions, she'd rather not deal with it.

(Which wasn't their fault, of course — only a tiny handful of them knew she couldn't answer the sort of questions they were wont to ask, because she _didn't remember bloody anything_. It was still irritating.)

She'd been sitting for maybe two minutes, Sasha still off in the kitchens, when she felt... Well, it was very similar to that compulsion of Sasha's actually. An odd sense of weight crawling across the air, soft and tingling against her skin, rather like a single loud bass note, lingering long after it'd been struck. Cina didn't know what the compulsion was trying to do, exactly, her fist clenching as she braced herself, she just shoved it off without a second of hesitation. And then spent a moment suppressing the anger trying to claw up her throat.

She _hated_ it when people messed with her head. Wonder why.

Instinctively, her eyes flicked up, tracked across the room, tracing that whatever that had been back to its source. Standing only a few paces away from the counter was a Zeltron, probably somewhere around her age. Black-blue hair glimmering and pale robe nearly shining in the sunlight, he was staring right back at her, a crooked grin splitting the blood red of his face nearly in two.

Oh. That hadn't been Jedi magic, then — Zeltrons had their own natural telepathy...thing, he'd probably been using that instead.

Though...Sasha's compulsion felt pretty similar. Huh.

While she was distracted with that interesting thought, the Zeltron had started sashaying his way over toward her, still grinning like a lunatic. Great. While she still had a moment, Cina braced herself, preparing to resist whatever feelings he'd certainly try to slip into her head at some point — not necessarily out of malice, Zeltrons just did that as a part of normal conversation, their innate talents seamlessly integrated into their culture.

Not that Cina had realised she knew that. She could remember meeting Zeltrons before, of course — she'd discovered she could even speak a Zeltrosi language she didn't remember learning back on Coruscant — but she hadn't been at all aware of their compulsions happening then. She could feel the _effects_ , obviously, but...

Blame it on her fucked up memory, move on.

"Hello, there," the Zeltron said, his voice coming in a bouncy chirp. "This seat taken?"

Cina took a second to evaluate the likelihood she could avoid being drawn into a conversation here without getting an annoying lecture for it later. Yeah, zero, fine. "Does it look taken to you?"

"Mm, things don't always look as they are." He flopped down into a seat, smooth and boneless, planted his elbows on the table, slouching over toward her a bit. "My name's Rhysam. You would be?"

"Cina."

His smile tilted into a smirk. Another compulsion leaked out of him, breaking across Cina without any effect — she assumed he was projecting wry amusement to match the smirk. "Just Cina?"

She ticked up an eyebrow. "Zeltrons don't even have last names. Why should you care about mine?"

The smirk reverted back into a grin, Rhysam's dark eyes almost seeming to gleam. "Good point. I suppose I'm just used to humans being such...well, humans."

Despite herself, Cina felt a smile pull at her lips. "I'm told I hardly count." Asyr had made a point of that all the bloody time (hence the smiling). Which was rather silly — she was pretty sure she was just bloody weird, not so entirely strange she shouldn't still count as human. Every group had their own stereotypes about other groups, just a natural consequence of the development of subcultures, and she was well aware she didn't meet the expectations many other species had for what humans were supposed to act like. Of course, stereotypes about humans didn't tend to be _at all_ flattering, so she usually chose to take it as a compliment.

"Mm." Rhysam was mercifully silent a short moment, poking at his stew. "Anyway, what are you doing out here, hiding by yourself off in a corner?"

"I don't suppose if I told you to piss off and mind your own business you actually would."

He smirked. "Probably not, no."

She shook her head, letting out a long, thin sigh. And didn't answer the question. "Did you just land today? I'm pretty sure I haven't seen you here yet. I think I would remember, the only other Zeltron Jedi I can think of is, er..." She abruptly realised that was a very tactless thing to say to someone she'd just met. It would have been nice to have noticed that early, so she didn't go trailing off and staring at him like a bloody idiot.

But he didn't take offense, still smiling at her easy as anything. "I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you mean my cousin Sesai."

Cina nearly asked after that, but caught herself. It wasn't a surprise they'd be related. Zeltrons had always been under-represented among the Jedi — some of their writers even claimed Zeltron users of the Force would inevitably be taken over by the Dark Side, which was quite possibly the most racist thing she'd ever heard from a Jedi — and there was more than enough evidence to suggest Force sensitivity was heritable. No reason to make a big production over it, especially since he surely had to deal with that all the bloody time.

"Anyway, yes, I did just land today. I've been wandering for a few years now, decided it was time for a break. This is the closest enclave to where I happened to be at the time."

Frowning, Cina asked, "Wandering?"

"Yep." Absently chewing at a roll, it took a second for Rhysam to figure out she had no idea what she was talking about. "Never heard of nomadic Jedi before?" He hadn't swallowed before trying to speak, so it came out a bit muffled, but not so much Cina couldn't tell what he was saying.

"No, I don't think so." She could guess at the concept easily enough — Jedi unattached to any specific enclave, or perhaps even the Order at large, just wandering around the galaxy and doing their thing. She simply hadn't heard of any before. "Are there many of those?"

Rhysam shrugged. "More than there used to be. A lot of people were unhappy with the Exis Reformations, and plenty... Well, they sort of quit the _Order_ while remaining Jedi, if that makes any sense. Most of them completely ignore the Council, just go where the Force directs them, do what they feel needs doing. But there is a long tradition of this sort of thing — the regimented Order as we know it didn't truly exist until after the Council established itself on Coruscant, over seven thousand years ago now, before then wandering Jedi performing random acts of service all over the galaxy was the norm. A minority of Jedi kept up the older way of doing things, but they've been small in number ever since.

"My master was one of the Jedi who left in protest after Exis, actually. I've sort of just been following in her footsteps." His lips quirking in a queer little smile, he said, "But, it can get a little lonely, drifting around by yourself, sometimes I feel like dropping in on one enclave or another for a little bit. So, here I am."

"Hmm." Now that she thought about it, this wasn't entirely new information — in the early days of the Republic, Jedi were known to just randomly show up, pull off some impressive bit of heroics or diplomacy, only to vanish again, and it _was_ true that the Council had been formed at the dedication of the Temple on Coruscant upon the defeat of the Pius Dea Republic, more than twenty-thousand years after the (semi-legendary) foundation of the Order. There was even linguistic evidence, various corruptions of _jedi_ appearing in many languages throughout the core as a word for a kind stranger, or serendipity, that sort of thing. It simply hadn't occurred to her to think of the implications of all that before.

Well, the person she'd been before certainly had, which probably explained it being not at all a surprise, but Cianen hadn't in any case.

Anyway, not that important. "I hadn't realised the Exis Reformations were so controversial among the Jedi. I mean, the Order tends to be very good at presenting a united front to the rest of the galaxy, we're hardly aware of internal divisions at all."

Rhysam let out a hum, nodded for a moment as he finished chewing — at least he wasn't trying to talk with his mouth half-full again. "That is by design, of course, and we are taught to keep our disagreements to ourselves. But, like any organisation composed of thousands and thousand of individual beings, there _are_ —" The man broke off, straightening in his seat, the faint smile replaced with a blank sort of focus. His hand snapped toward his waist, where Cina knew his lightsaber was hung.

At the very same moment, the faint tingling of Sasha's presence appeared at the edges of Cina's awareness.

Gritting her teeth at the harsh fear suddenly springing from Sasha's direction, it took a second for Cina to relax her jaw enough to get actual words out — luckily, Rhysam hadn't drawn his weapon in that time. "Calm down, Rhysam. She's with me."

Rhysam blinked. His eyes flicked back to her, staring for a long moment. Slowly, the tension drained from his shoulders, again falling into his careless slouch. "Right. Of course." A grin again splitting his face, he glanced over his shoulder. Directly at where Sasha stood. Pitched in a low whisper, though still with that cheerful bounce to it, he said, "Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you. You startled me there."

"She doesn't speak Basic." Glancing quick out into the rest of the room — good, it didn't look like they'd drawn any attention — Cina beckoned Sasha toward her with a little flick of her fingers. "It's okay, Sasha," she muttered in Mandoa. "He's harmless, you just surprised him." Of course, Cina _very_ much doubted Rhysam was truly harmless, but she also doubted he was the sort to go about stabbing children, no matter how unnerving they were.

"Yes, very surprise. Very sneaky, you are, child."

Cina blinked, staring at Rhysam; Sasha, still a couple metres away, froze as well. That had been Mandoa. Extremely awkward, obviously, but recogniseable. "You speak Mandoa?" In her experience, outsiders who spoke Mandoa were...well, just her, pretty much. She might even wonder if she were originally Mandoade if she couldn't inexplicably speak so many bloody languages Mandoa was just a drop in the bucket.

Shrugging, Rhysam lifted a hand, thumb and finger held a centimetre apart. "Learn little, at war. But not use, very bad."

"You found me." Sasha came to stand behind Cina, peeking at Rhysam over her right shoulder. "Nobody else can find me. Just Cina."

Rhysam grinned, so bright his eyes nearly seemed to sparkle. "Yes, also I am sneaky."

"I'm assuming you can feel her through Zeltron things, not Jedi things. The other Jedi can't spot her at all."

Switching back to Basic, he said, "If we're getting technical about it, what my people do _is_ through the Force, just not the same way Jedi do it. It's sort of like broadcasting on a different frequency, like. Jedi can train themselves to do it, but it's not part of the standard curriculum, they'd have to come into extended contact with Zeltrons to pick it up. Some people do have broader perception naturally, but that's rather rare."

That was probably why she could feel Sasha and pick up on Rhysam's compulsions, now that she thought about it — she'd apparently been one of the original Revanchists, even part of Lesami and Alek's inner circle, so she must have spent some considerable time around Sesai Rhysa.

Which did explain more than just that. It'd been bothering her, since she'd first caught sight of him, a faint sense at first but growing harder and harder to ignore by the second. It was difficult to put words to, exactly. Rhysam just felt...familiar. If the person she'd been before had spent some years in the company of one of Rhysam's relatives, that would make perfect sense — she couldn't remember off hand what exactly Sesai looked like, but she wouldn't be surprised if there was some family resemblence. Especially since people tended to have greater difficulty differentiating members of other species, even between ones so closely related as humans and Zeltrons.

Not that it particularly mattered, it was just interesting to think about.

"So, are you just going around collecting Mandalorian orphans now?"

It took Cina a moment to answer, frowning back at Rhysam. There had been something...odd, on his voice, she couldn't say exactly what. "I didn't do it on purpose. We stole a ship to get off Taris, the kid just happened to be hiding on it at the time. Though, honestly, I really don't know what I'm going to do about her."

One narrow black eyebrow stretched up Rhysam's forehead. "What do you mean?

There were many ways she _could_ answer that question. She knew Sasha was listening in on these ridiculous lessons she was getting, knew she would inevitably start trying things out for herself — Cina was hardly qualified to deal with that sort of thing. She wasn't really qualified to deal with children in general, especially not one so deeply traumatised. (It'd been roughly a week now, and Sasha still didn't let that knife out of her sight, bathed and even slept with it.) She couldn't help the feeling that in just...going along with it, essentially taking responsibility for her and letting everything develop as it may, she was making an _enormous_ mistake that would inevitably lead to some disaster down the line. She couldn't guess exactly what, there was just no way this would end well.

She _could_ say all that, but she really didn't want to. "I don't suppose the Order particularly approve of their members adopting Force-sensitive children," she drawled.

A peculiar look of surprise crossed Rhysam's face, just for a moment before it was wiped away with another painfully buoyant grin. "I don't suppose you particularly care."

Good point. She didn't choose to smirk back at him, but she could feel the expression taking shape on her face, so she must be.

"But, no, you're not wrong — the party line has included a very dim view of that sort of personal relationship since the Exis Reformations. Before than..." With a crooked grimace, Rhysam wiggled a hand in the air. "Jedi were permitted families, before, but we were always meant to be mindful of any selfish corruption of our priorities. So long as our personal lives didn't interfere with our service overmuch, nobody cared.

"Actually," he said, with a sardonic little smile, "the Grandmaster herself has a daughter. Last I heard, Vima has children too, don't know exactly how many. You tend not to hear about Vima very much. When Exis happened she was a teenager, I think, and she never went along with it, she quit the Council within a few months. Gossip about her does crop up every once in a while, more than most nomadic Jedi — I mean, obviously, she's the Grandmaster's daughter — but that sort of detail isn't something Jedi are going to be spreading around. She hasn't fallen to the Dark Side, you see, it's bad for their narrative."

Her smirk stretched itself wider. "Well, you can't let the children hear something like that. If they know it's all shite from the outset, the brainwashing won't stick properly."

"And what a tragedy that would be — if everyone knows too much about these things, you might get a whole generation of Jedi that actually think for themselves!"

"Perish the thought."

Despite the spine-tingling compulsion washing against the edges of her mind, Cina couldn't help smiling back at the ridiculous little man. At least she'd managed to find _one_ Jedi who was actually worth talking to.

* * *

"Hey, Boss."

Cina looked up from her datapad, quickly finding Kandosa seated at the game table. "What, Spongecake?"

A grimace pulled at his craggy face, falling into a heavy glare. "Are you ever going to stop calling me that?"

"Until I find something funnier, no, probably not."

From behind the sofa Cina was reclined across came a sudden storm of high giggling. Kandosa tried to look like he was angry with Sasha laughing at him, but he didn't do a very good job of it, his stormy glare twitching at the edges with a poorly-hidden smile. The bloke might like to pretend he was a hard son of a bitch, but it was bloody obvious he had a soft spot for kids — or maybe he just liked Mission and Sasha in particular, she guessed, she hadn't seen him around any others. "I'm bored. Get over here." He poked at the table for a moment, the projector lighting up with words Cina couldn't read from this angle.

She hesitated a brief moment, eyes drifting back to the document she'd been reading. It was an ethics treatise, written by a Jedi Master some millennia dead. Cina might just be spoiled by Alderaanian and Alsakani classics, but she thought it was bloody terrible. Pedantic and preachy, the logic in some the arguments flawed in critical places, the assumptions behind certain premises shockingly naïve — even the writing was shite, dry and opaque and unnecessarily verbose and just plain _boring_.

Not for the first time, Cina wondered if Dorak were selecting her reading material with the conscious intention of torturing her.

Fuck it. She and Dorak would just get into a circular discussion over trivial nonsense again, he probably wouldn't notice she'd never actually finished it. Tossing the pad aside, she popped up to her feet only to collapse again into the chair across from him. "So, what are we playing?"

It turned out to be a variation on an old grand strategy game. She was completely unfamiliar with this particular iteration, but it didn't matter, they were all functionally similar. They debated briefly on the scenario they'd be starting at — it was possible to start from the very beginning, a civilisation just on the cusp of achieving interstellar space flight, but there was simply no way they'd ever be able to finish one of those tonight. In the end, they agreed that they'd try doing that some other day, if they decided they liked this game enough. Instead, they picked a scenario where the galaxy was divided between several major powers, with a spread of different political systems and resource advantages.

Scrolling through her options, Cina occasionally glanced up to frown at Kandosa through the layers of holograms. She couldn't actually see what he was doing — directional audiovisual media really were neat — but she'd bet he'd pick... Well, this game didn't use familiar names, but one civilisation had obviously been modeled on the Mandoade, another on Atrisia. Kandosa would all but certainly pick one of those two. Given that, she wasn't sure which of the others would give her the best chance.

The Atrisian Commonwealth predated the Republic, and had endured all that time as an independent power. It was _still_ independent, in fact, had rebuffed all offers to join or form any sort of treaty alliance. Even trade was severely limited, to all but the Giju, close neighbours they'd had peaceable relations with for millennia. However, while the Atrisians were a proud, militant society, they _weren't_ expansionist — they were perfectly willing to remain within the borders they'd held for all of recorded history. Very few had ever attempted to invade the Commonwealth, largely because the Atrisians were at least diplomatic enough to avoid offending anyone. All who _had_ had been swiftly crushed through overwhelming tactical superiority — the Atrisians were somewhat behind the rest of the galaxy technologically, were a comparatively small society with limited resources, but they had long ago perfected the art of war, they'd _never_ lost even a single battle to an outside power.

The Mandoade, on the other hand, were...well, the Mandoade. They were just as martial as the Atrisians, though somewhat less authoritarian — most outsiders didn't realise just how democratic Mandoade society was, at least so far as day-to-day domestic affairs went. If Cina had to name the one greatest advantage the Mandoade had over Atrisia, for the purposes of a game like this one, it was their universalism: the Mandoade were a _culture_ , not a race, any being willing to adopt their way of life was welcome. Of course, this did leave them vulnerable to infiltration by outside powers. Not to mention, it was all too easy for their pride to be corrupted into imperialist zeal, inspiring them to conquer faster than they could integrate — that was exactly what had happened before and during the recent war, in fact.

Both civilisations had serious, glaring weaknesses. The problem was, without knowing more details on how this particular iteration of the game worked, she couldn't guess which of the other options would be best suited to take advantage of them. The collectivist mindset of the Alsakani could weaken the authority of the much more elitist Atrisians... _if_ this game handled the subtler shades of power projection well enough. The fluid trade dynamics and alliances of a Corellian-style conglomerate could prove very effective at countering Mandoade aggression... _if_ diplomatic and economic features were designed the way she would do it. Without knowing how the game was put together...

Eh. Cina picked the Corellian stand-in, more out of a lack of more promising options than any real confidence. Corellian diplomacy had historically been very useful against various expansionist powers, and they wouldn't have the military disadvantage the Alderaanian equivalent should. It would do.

After some minutes of the two of them silently poking around, Kandosa asked, "So what do they have you doing over there all day anyway?"

"Reading and sitting under this damn tree slow-thinking, mostly." Mandoa didn't actually have a word for _meditate_ , that was probably close enough. "Apparently, they want me to prove I'm at least marginally trustworthy before moving on to real Jedi things and swordplay."

Kandosa shot her an almost disgusted frown through the haze of holograms. "That sounds horribly boring."

"It is that."

"I think I'd leave and join up with the Sith, if it were me. Say what you want about the Sith, but at least they treat people like people, not damn droids. Seriously, have you ever tried talking to a Jedi about, well, anything?"

"More than I'd like the last few weeks, believe me." Cina frowned at one of her displays, fingers tapping idly at the table. That was a rather aggressive rejection of her offer to open up trade with one of her neighbours — they were going to be a problem. Or perhaps an opportunity, but this early in the game she'd have to be _really_ bloody careful... "Don't get me wrong, sitting around trying to _feel the Force flow through me_ ," she said in Basic, just so she wouldn't have to figure out how to say that in Mandoa, "has been surprisingly helpful in learning to focus this shite better, but it is _very_ tedious. And I've been stuck talking ethics with this Dorak arse. You think just an ordinary conversation with a Jedi is trying, you don't even know the shite I've been dealing with lately."

"I didn't think there was anything to talk about." There was a note of irony on Kandosa's voice, but his face was almost impressively blank, not betraying a hint of a smirk. "I thought the Jedi already know everything there is about right and wrong and all that."

"They certainly think so. Dorak does always seem strangely surprised whenever I disagree with him." Which wasn't _all_ the time — Dorak wasn't quite as blindly dogmatic as certain other Jedi — but it was often enough she was gradually learning what sort of thing to avoid saying to prevent a tedious argument. "To be as fair as possible, most Jedi ethics aren't actually _that_ bad. Their philosophy on most things would be reasonable enough if we lived in a perfect world. But..." Cina shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many ways I've found to politely call a man twenty years my senior a naïve child."

"I don't think I would," Kandosa said, a corner of his lips curling. "You have quite the mouth on you."

"Yes. I'm known for it, in fact." Actually, she wasn't, since Cianen Hayal didn't exist, so her students and colleagues she remembered messing with at the University wouldn't remember her (and possibly didn't even exist themselves). Sometimes she forgot for a second — this fake identity shite really was quite confusing.

"Why do you even bother putting up with it? I haven't known you for very long, but I was still sure you would have told them to fuck off and moved on." He said it casually enough, but something on Kandosa's voice told her he was far more interested than he sounded. Probably the reason he'd started up the conversation in the first place.

Cina shrugged. "I didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. If I hadn't agreed to submit to their whole ridiculous program they probably wouldn't have let me leave the complex."

A brief flash of hot anger burst from just behind her, where Sasha was watching the game over her shoulder. She didn't say anything though, and it drained away after a second.

It was obvious Sasha believed her just from that, but Kandosa didn't look like he did. "Are the Jedi allowed to just hold random people like that? I'm still not as familiar with Republic law as I should be..."

"By the letter of the law? No." Actually, now that she thought about it, they might. Cianen was an Alderaanian citizen, of course, and couldn't be held against her will, but if they openly claimed she was the person she'd once been she might still count as a Jedi — the Order could do pretty much whatever they wanted with their own members. Not that the distinction really mattered, "But the letter of the law wouldn't necessarily come into play. They'd claim some sort of wartime exception, wouldn't be difficult to argue they should be able to hold an uncooperative _Force-sensitive_ , what with the war with the Sith. And if they're not challenged, they won't even _need_ to make the argument — we _are_ in the middle of nowhere, it's likely no one of importance would find out about it.

"And they _are_ worried I'll leave to join the Sith — I did used to be one before, after all, they'd be idiots to _not_ worry about it. Probably why they're taking everything so infuriatingly slow. So, yeah, they'd probably just lock me up somewhere until I agree to play nice." Or fuck around with her head again to see if it works out better the second time, who knows.

"You were Sith?" Kandosa was staring at her through the array of holograms — she didn't need the itching crawling across the air to be able to tell he was confused, it was clear on his face.

She was confused herself for a moment, before she remembered Kandosa had been in the hold working on the inventory when they'd had that conversation. Oops. It took a few moments to explain the whole ridiculous thing, that she'd been a Revanchist and then a Sith, all of her memories had been forcibly replaced, and now she had to deal with the people who'd done it to her without showing any negative feelings about it, blah blah.

That just seemed to be making Kandosa _more_ confused, the itching growing sharper until it was almost painful. (She _still_ hadn't learned how to turn this damn thing off, because Tokare couldn't possibly teach her something actually _useful_.) "But there weren't any Mandoade Revanchists."

Cina blinked. "Huh?"

"Aren't you Mandoade? I assumed, you know far more than any outsider I've ever met. You sound like a Vorpayyade farmer."

"Fuck, Kandosa, do you have _any idea_ how many languages I speak?" Of course he didn't, _she_ didn't even know... "I probably used some crazy Jedi thing to pick it up, I don't remember. Sure, I might speak Mandoa like a Vorpayyade farmer, but I also speak _Basic_ like an _Alsakani noble_ — one who's spent far too much time in seedy pubs, but still. Which do you think is more likely?"

Kandosa looked less than convinced, but he just shrugged it off, focused back on their game without another word.

For some reason, Cina found herself smiling. It took her a brief moment to figure out why. Mandoade were a notoriously prickly lot, after all — if Kandosa was going to insist on believing Cina had been one of them, she was just going to take that as a compliment.

* * *

 _Took forever to update, I know. Depression means writer's block, fucking pain. What little I've been able to get out I've been trying to focus on AAtP, though that hasn't been going so well either. Bluh._

 _Next chapter when I get to it. Bluh._

 _—Lysandra_


	14. Drawing Lines — IV

_Sesai wasn't certain he had the right address. Hell, he wasn't even entirely certain he was in the right building — even after several years on Coruscant, he still got lost far too easily. But while the bright gleaming white tile and shuffling leaves of the hallway were completely unfamiliar, Lesami's burning presence in the Force a few metres before him was unmistakable._

 _It was quite simply impossible to miss Lesami, after all._

 _A brief moment after tripping the tone, he faintly felt something stretch in his general direction, a thin filament of power reaching into the door. It clicked open, so Sesai pushed inside._

 _He'd never been to Lesami's apartment before — she had only gotten it a couple weeks ago, shortly after landing her apprenticeship. (Apparently Kreia had recommended Lesami move out of the Temple, which Sesai took as a good sign, that her new Master understood her that well.) He hadn't been entirely surprised to learn the neighborhood it was in, given how her filthy rich father had been trying to buy her forgiveness for years now. He still thought this sort of thing was just kind of_ weird — _his people had a very different idea of luxury than many beings' — but he hadn't thought it his business to comment._

 _He couldn't deny it was sort of nice-looking. The room he entered into was covered in white carpets and walls, almost_ too _white, the morning sun pouring through the wall of east-facing windows — through which he could see the towers of the capitol district, the dome of the Senate just visible at the right edge — setting the whole room to a nearly painful glow. (He'd been here long enough the sun, significantly brighter than Zelle, didn't bother him day to day, but occasionally he was reminded.) The room was very clean and very pretty, but rather empty, still appearing un-lived-in. Save for the stools before the high counter blocking off what, by the glimpse he caught of appliances and cabinets, appeared to be the kitchen and a single dark sofa and a couple boxes stacked in the corner the sizeable room was almost entirely empty._

 _Lesami was in here, though, and she wasn't alone. Somewhat to Sesai's surprise — Lesami could be so overwhelming, he hadn't sensed anyone else — Nisotsa was here too, standing over by the sofa, halfway through getting properly dressed. (Jedi robes did have so many tedious layers.) While she was at least presentable, Lesami really wasn't, leaning against the counter in a housecoat, just cinching the belt just as Sesai pulled the door closed behind him._

 _He blinked at her. "Were you just naked a second ago?"_

 _With a quirked eyebrow that was_ far _too powerfully mocking for how mild the expression was, Lesami drawled, "Don't sound too disappointed, Sesai."_

" _I'm surprised she bothered finally putting that on," Nisotsa grumbled through the cloth covering her head. A yank had the thing straightened out, her face appearing again, light hair turned disheveled and fuzzy. Cutting a sharp glare at Lesami, "She's been lounging about without a stitch on near since we got here last evening."_

 _Lesami shrugged. "My flat, my rules."_

" _I should come here more often."_

 _Rolling her eyes, Nisotsa muttered something that sounded very much like, "Bloody Zeltrons." Then at full volume, "Anyway, I have to get going if I don't want to get lectured at for being late. Are you coming up to the Temple at all today?"_

" _I wasn't planning on it." Lesami sank into one of the stools, picked a steaming mug up off the counter; her eyes followed Nisotsa as she walked over, pulling a biscuit out of a crinkly foil bag a short distance away. "I still need to fill this place out a bit, Kreia's giving me a day off to go shopping."_

 _Chewing, Nisotsa stalled a moment. "Mm. If you're going to keep inviting me over, either get a second bed or some bloody nightclothes."_

" _I will weigh my options."_

" _Right. See you, Sami, Sesai."_

" _Toodles, love."_

 _Sesai blinked — that sounded...weird. Higher and smoother than her voice normally was, coming off a bit..._

" _Mm-hmm." With an exaggerated roll of her eyes, Nisotsa slipped past Sesai, vanished out the door._

 _As soon as she was gone, he asked, "You trying to get in her pants?"_

 _Lesami gave him a flat, blank sort of look. "Is that the only thing Zeltrons think about?"_

" _Well, not the_ only _thing." Smirking the whole way, he sauntered over, dropping into the stool next to her. "But, well, the_ lounging about without a stitch on _, as she so adorably put it — that posh Alderaanian accent she has, honestly —_ especially _since you were apparently sharing a bed last night... Granted, I'm still not the most comfortable with Core culture, but that seems off to me. And that_ toodles, love _a second ago was probably the most flirty-sounding thing I've_ ever _heard you say. What else am I supposed to think?"_

" _I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about."_

" _Uh-huh." Sesai smirked. "Word of advice? Just come right out and say it. Not exactly being subtle as it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if most Jedi need a solid knock upside the head to get the message. We're taught to ignore that sort of thing entirely, after all."_

" _Should I_ ever _decide I do want to seduce Nisotsa, I'll certainly remember your unsolicited meddling."_

" _I'm sure — I am hard to forget like that."_

 _Letting out a harsh sigh, Lesami's eyes tipped up to the ceiling for a second. "What are you doing here, Sesai?"_

" _If you didn't want me dropping by, you shouldn't have given me your address."_

" _I knew you would at some point. I just didn't think it would be a weekday morning. Don't you have somewhere else to be?"_

 _He shrugged — he would certainly miss a couple lectures while he was here, but he didn't at all care. Why the fuck did they even need to take physics and astrogation courses, that's what computers were for. Ayrsa would probably get annoyed at him for blowing off lectures, again, but he should be well familiar with Sesai being Sesai by now. "Yeah, but you're more fun than Kurshaq."_

 _Seemingly despite herself, Lesami let out a short guffaw. "I should hope so. That monotone drone he has, I swear..."_

" _Yeah, when I should be shut up in a room with him, well..." A smirk pulling at his lips, he let one hand drop, his fingers gently falling on Lesami's bare leg, just above her knee. She glanced down for an instant before meeting his eyes again, one eyebrow slowly stretching upward. Switching to Anashije, he muttered, "I'd much rather be shut up in a room with you."_

 _Matching the language change with natural ease, "You're ridiculous, you know that."_

" _I have been informed." He let his fingers wander, softly tracing over her skin, up to the hem of her housecoat and back again, little circles. Taking a casual sip of her caf, she shot a narrow glare at him over the mug — though she didn't do anything to remove his hand, so he just grinned back. "I mean, we're friends, aren't we?"_

 _Lesami rolled her eyes, muttering what was probably a curse in a language he didn't understand. "This isn't Zeltros, Sesai. Most people don't just go around fucking their friends."_

" _I know that." It did still happen here, of course, but it wasn't nearly as common as he knew it was back home. Hell, Zeltrosi_ expected _close friends to have sex occasionally, it was perfectly normal to them. (It still sort of confused him that other people didn't expect it, honestly.) "But, I don't suppose you're romantically invested in Nisotsa, either."_

" _Well, no..."_

" _If you have to talk to Alek about it first, that's fine. I thought I'd, you know, make it clear I'm not just playing around." He was pretty sure she caught the reference: he had nearly kissed her a few times at the Temple — he was a teenager, and she was fun, it was instinct, he couldn't help it — and she always stopped him and told him to stop playing around. With significant glances around them, because the Masters obviously wouldn't approve._

 _That was the message he'd taken from it anyway. The message he'd taken from Lesami giving him the address of her private apartment had also seemed perfectly clear, but it was becoming obvious she hadn't meant it the way he'd taken it. Oops?_

 _Oh well. If she was firmly opposed to it she would have reacted way worse than this._

 _But now she was giving him a confused sort of frown, slowly blinking. "Uh... Why would I need to talk to Alek?"_

" _I just figured, he doesn't like me much, he probably wouldn't be happy about it." To be perfectly accurate, Alek didn't_ dislike _him — he simply took absolutely no efforts to hide how attractive he found Lesami,_ that _Alek didn't like at all. Which was silly, but Sesai suspected Zeltrons were physically incapable of feeling that sort of jealousy, he would never get it._

" _No, he probably wouldn't, but it's_ also _none of his bloody business, is it?" There was a note of heat on her voice, somewhere between irritation and exasperation. Directed at Sesai, he was pretty sure, but perhaps not all of it._

 _Which was_ really _confusing. "Wait. Aren't you two a thing?"_

 _With another flat, unamused sort of look, she said, "You think I spent the last twelve hours looking to shag Nisotsa, but you also think Alek and I are_ a thing _?"_

 _Sesai shrugged. "Well, I figured he just didn't have a problem with Nisotsa. That happens, right? I'm_ pretty sure _polyamorous humans exist, anyway."_

" _Ah..." Lesami blinked at him some more. Then, as his fingers took another pass high up her thigh, she shifted in her seat, cleared her throat, took another sip from her mug. (Sesai noticed this one wasn't quite as smooth and casual as the last.) "Yes, polyamourous humans exist. No, Alek and I are not_ a thing _. He's trying to be a good little Jedi at the moment," she added, a trace of annoyance just noticeable. That one_ definitely _wasn't directed at him._

" _Huh." Weird. They weren't subtle about their mutual interest at all, enough he'd figured_ something _was going on._

 _The words were on the edge of his tongue, that she should really do something about the bitterness he felt echoing in the air around her. It had nothing to do with Alek, really, that familiar malaise that had been following her since the day they'd met. She really shouldn't just...ignore it, as everyone had evidently been doing for years now. But he ultimately stopped himself. He wasn't here to make her feel miserable — quite the opposite, in fact. If he suggested she consider seeking psychiatric treatment it'd just result in an uncomfortable argument, it wouldn't end well for anybody._

 _So, ignoring all that, about her and Alek, if there_ wasn't _anything going on there, for whatever silly, inane reason, "Then there shouldn't be a problem, right?" His fingers drifted higher, pushing the hem up—_

 _Drawing in a sharp breath through her teeth, Lesami's hand snapped down against his wrist, locking his hand in place, high up her thigh. She stared blankly out toward the bank of windows for a moment, brow stitched with a soft frown. A few seconds of silence, then she muttered, "I'm not sure that would be a good idea, Sesai."_

" _Why not? We are friends, aren't we?"_

 _Lesami snorted out a laugh, shook her head, lips twitching with a rueful smile. Switching back to Basic, "Bloody Zeltron."_

" _Mm-hmm."_

 _With a long, thin sigh, her other hand came up, running slowly through her hair. Her eyes flicked to his for a moment, then looked down, her pale skin and white robe throwing his hand on her thigh into sharp contrast. She was still for a moment, silent and staring, the air about her churning, clearly thinking about something._

 _Because Zeltrons were cheaters like that, she felt her come to a decision before she said or did anything, the unseen tension about her lifting away, replaced with an anxious, giddy lightness that brought a vicarious nervous smile to his face._

" _Fuck it." Her hand gripping his loosened, and she turned in her seat a little, facing more directly toward him, uncrossing her legs as she went. "As long as it's clear we are friends and not...anything else..." With a crooked, coy sort of smile, she glanced up at him through her lashes. "I suppose there are worse people to be shut up in a room with."_

 _Sesai laughed._

* * *

Cina was drawn away from sleep, fitfully, reluctantly.

For long, innumerable moments, she lay there, not truly thinking, not truly anything. She felt all too heavy, all too, too _tired_. She didn't want to be awake, she really, really didn't.

Eventually, she noticed she was also all too warm. Not so warm it was uncomfortable, exactly, but warmer than she should reasonably expect to be on the ship. She also felt rather more constricted than she should, things hemming her in from both sides, warm things.

Warm bodies.

Finally waking up enough for her brain to work properly, it only took a second to remember who the one behind her — flush against her back nearly shoulder to knee, one arm flung over her hips, the occasional breath tickling her neck — must be. It was the one in front of her — a narrow distance away, mostly perceived as a weight on her pillow, the soft hiss of breath, warm and slightly scratchy cloth under her forearm — that she couldn't explain. She remembered bringing Rhysam back here, but last she remembered they'd been alone.

Reluctantly, she opened her eyes — and found Sasha lying there, her cheek centimetres from the tip of Cina's nose.

Her heart jumping into her throat, Cina started jerking away, then immediately stopped herself, before she could whip away the arm under her pillow, which would shake Sasha awake. She took a long, stuttering breath, trying to be quiet as possible.

"Mm, morning." Rhysam laid a soft kiss at the base of her neck.

Which she wouldn't ordinarily have a problem with, if there wasn't a _little kid in bed with them at the moment_. Gingerly, Cina tipped her shoulder back, until she could see Rhysam behind her. He was just sleepily smiling at her, apparently unbothered by the situation. "How long has she been here?"

Rhysam shrugged. "Since just a few minutes after you fell asleep, I think."

"Shite." Cina rubbed at a cheek with her free hand, trying to suppress the squirming nausea crawling up her throat.

"What's the big deal? I thought she crawled into bed with you all the time."

She opened her eyes again to throw him a sharp look — wasn't that bloody _obvious_? "Rhysam, we're both naked in here." She could still smell sex on the air, even, it was just... This was just...

And Rhysam had the nerve to _shrug_ again, helplessly, like being uncomfortable with this was completely incomprehensible and unreasonable. Because he was a silly little berk like that. "She's a Mandalorian, Cina. They don't make a habit of hiding sex from their children. I'm sure she knows what we were doing, and I'm sure she doesn't care."

Cina opened her mouth to snap at him — then abruptly cut herself off, frowned at the wall behind him. Because, well, he _was_ right about that. And even if he weren't, it probably wouldn't occur to _him_ to be uncomfortable about this either — it wasn't unusual for Zeltrosi families to all sleep in one room, and they didn't take pains to insulate children from sex either. They weren't to _participate_ , obviously, Zeltrons were very strict about things like incest and consent. Perhaps even more careful about the former than they had to be, considering many "siblings" weren't actually blood-related (group marriage was funny like that). Given his cultural background, expecting him to be as uncomfortable with this as she was would be unreasonable.

But it just... She couldn't help it, it just felt _really_ creepy.

"You realize she _was_ in the room for part of it."

"You're _not_ helping." Cina shivered, something cold and sick running through her, only for a second before she got distracted. "Wait, are you sure? I didn't feel her there."

Rhysam smirked. "Yes, well, you were distracted. My head _was_ between your legs at the time, and I've noticed that—"

Before he could get out whatever annoyingly self-congratulatory thing he was about to say, Cina smacked his chest with the back of her hand. "Oh, shut up, you. You don't have to sound so happy with yourself."

"Why not? _You_ sounded plenty happy with me, it—"

Cina smacked him again.

It did seem Rhysam was _trying_ to keep his chuckling as quiet as possible, but it wasn't enough anyway. There was a soft moan from Cina's other side, a shuffling, an impression of movement carrying through the pillow. And then a faint squeak, the bed noticeably jolting as a flash of power burned through the air. When Cina glanced back in Sasha's direction, she was already up, standing a few metres away, and completely invisible.

Apparently, crawling into bed with Cina and a man she'd just been shagging was perfectly fine, but lying that close to her when they were both awake was uncomfortable. Cina just didn't get Sasha sometimes.

Must be some kind of masochist, surrounding herself with Mandoade and Zeltrons...

After a few awkward minutes, they managed to get themselves dressed and out of the room — at least, _Cina_ was uncomfortable, Sasha and Rhysam didn't seem nearly as bothered as she was. Sasha was somewhat more wary than most mornings, but they were usually alone most mornings, she still wasn't entirely comfortable around Rhysam. And he just seemed amused with her, irritating little shite. She couldn't even explain why, she wasn't usually the modest type, but she was peculiarly aware that Sasha was there watching, had to fight the urge to keep herself covered, which was just unhelpful, couldn't get dressed if she couldn't bloody get out of bed, she was being so _silly_. She just...

She wasn't used to there being little kids around the morning after, okay? She had no fucking clue what to do with this, it was just bloody _weird_.

The smirking, gleeful giggles Mission met them with the moment they walked into the main room wasn't helping. Shooting her a brief exasperated glance on her way toward the caf, Cina snapped, "Don't you start now."

She was facing away, but Cina could still hear the grin on Mission's voice. (Of course, there was also the giddy bubbling emanating from her direction, but Cina didn't need the Force to know either.) "I ain't starting nothing."

"Jumping down the poor girl's throat, Cina, I mean really." Rhysam's voice shifted to a false whisper, hissing easily loud enough for Cina and Zaalbar in the kitchen to hear it. "Besides, I already finished it, if you know what I mean."

Mission tried to snort and laugh at the same time, coming out as a harsh _snrk_ noise. "You're _awful_."

"Takes one to know one, sweetie."

"Uh hurr hurr."

Starting up the grinder with a sigh, Cina leaned a little closer to Zaalbar — pan-frying something, Cina could hardly tell what looking at it, but it always turned out fine. Under cover of the noises around them, she muttered, "Bringing him back here was a terrible decision. They're going to get on like a trash fire, he'll be a horrible influence."

He was giving her a flat, rueful sort of look, but his eyes, half-hidden by his heavy, bushy brows, were still sparkling with unvoiced laughter. "Funny, I thought the same thing about you when first we met."

"You're hilarious."

"If you say so. Seems a step up, in fact — this man hasn't even made anything explode yet."

"As I recall, that explosion saved your ungrateful arse."

"All the same."

She shook her head, grumbling, as sarcastically as she could manage, "Kids these days, I swear."

About a half an hour later — a time mostly filled with Cina trying to coax Sasha to actually eat at the table while Rhysam and Mission traded increasingly crude innuendos — Cina was walking back up to the Enclave, for what felt like the hundredth time. Sasha was invisibly trailing her as always, though Rhysam pacing her was new.

She wondered if any of the Jedi would comment on what had obviously just happened. Or...would it even be obvious to Jedi? She wasn't certain, they could be shockingly oblivious about normal person things sometimes.

She hoped nobody would make a point of being a bitch about it. Her patience was running perilously thin these days — it might be fun at the time, but she'd probably regret snarking back when it inevitably came around to bite her in the are. Stupid bloody Jedi and their idiotic ascetic shite...

"You okay over there?"

Cina blinked, glanced over at Rhysam. He'd drifted a little closer over the last seconds, looming over her shoulder, a peculiarly... She wasn't certain what that expression was, actually. Something soft and hesitant, anyway. "Ah... Sure? Why?"

A crooked frown twitched across his face for a second, before quickly vanishing — too quickly to be natural, he must have suppressed it on purpose. He opened his mouth, but didn't actually say anything, gaze turning distant and thoughtful.

He abruptly jerked to a stop, wrapping a hand around her upper arm to hold her back. "Rhysam, what—"

"You don't have to lie to me, Cina." He'd gone uncharacteristically serious, more solemn than Cina had ever seen him, face intensely blank, voice low and thick, mind hard and sharp. "I am a _bloody Zeltron_ , you know. I can tell what you're feeling."

He'd picked up on it, then, that damn heavy cloud of misery she just couldn't bloody shake. Awesome. Cina forced out a long, heavy sigh, her free hand running through her hair — she _really_ didn't want to talk about this. "Is there any way we can just...not? Just, forget about it." Oh, they were speaking Anashije again, when had that happened. "I don't even notice most of the time myself, honestly."

A reluctant smile quirked one corner of his lips. "Just because you're accustomed to feeling awful doesn't make it okay."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, _no_ , but what the fuck do you expect me to do about it? I assume it's something carrying over from before the Jedi screwed with my head — I can't exactly work out whatever issues the old me might have had if I _can't remember them_ , can I?"

"No, of course you can't. Which would be why I wasn't going to recommend you just _talk_ about it."

"That..." She just frowned at him for a second, blankly blinking. The faintly amused smile he was wearing wasn't making it easier for her to figure out what the fuck he was talking about, bloody pretty bastard. "Huh?"

He smirked. "Very articulate there, Cina."

"Fuck you."

"Yes, you did that already."

"Don't make me hurt you."

"You did that already, too. Seriously now, though," he said, the teasing smirk abruptly wiping away. "If _you_ don't know what the problem is, I think it's a pretty easy conclusion to make that it's not, just, something cognitive, that _can_ be talked out. Maybe it started that way, a long time ago, but if a brain does something for long enough it gets stuck in that pattern — feel shitty long enough, and your brain forgets how to _not_ feel shitty. At a certain point, the issue isn't a cognitive one anymore, but a medical one."

She blinked at him for another couple seconds. "You're suggesting I...go see a psychiatrist."

"That's exactly what I'm suggesting."

...Wow. The nerve of this one. Maybe fucking him _had_ been a bad idea. "That's really not necessary, Rhysam. I'm handling it just fine."

"I'm not denying that," he said, with a too-casual shrug that said he was _so_ denying that. "I'm just saying, you shouldn't _need_ to. And maybe you don't."

"Where do you get off?" Rhysam moved to speak, something about him feeling light and bubbly, so she snapped, " _Don't_ answer that with another bloody innuendo, so help me, I will throw you into that wall."

Bafflingly, Rhysam looked to be fighting a grin. _Such_ a silly boy, why did she subject herself to these things...

"I did not ask for your opinion, this is absolutely none of your business, and if you want me to continue speaking to you you will drop it, now."

"It _is_ my business, though."

" _Rhysam_ —"

"We are friends, aren't we?"

Her irritated retort she'd barely started died in her throat. She didn't really know how to respond to that. Because, they sort of were, weren't they? She certainly had spent more of her free time around Rhysam these last few weeks than virtually anybody else — she was at the Enclave for far too much of the day, and he was practically the only Jedi she knew who was really worth talking to. So, that probably wasn't an entirely inaccurate word to use. She just... It just felt kinda...

She didn't know what word she was looking for, really. _Humiliating_ wasn't quite right. _Vulnerable_ was closer, she guessed, but not perfect. She just...

Sometimes, things she said or felt that confused herself, she got the impression she'd once been a very private, very proud person. Conversations like this just... It felt like failing somehow, it would feel like failing, to...she didn't know, admit she couldn't handle...anything, really. That she couldn't do it herself, that she needed help, it felt like _losing_.

Cina _hated_ losing.

She drew in a long, shaky breath, letting it out in an even shakier sigh. What the fuck was old-her's problem, anyway? She was only human, and human brains were just shite sometimes — she certainly knew enough about psychology and neurology to have _that_ figured out. And whatever situation she'd been in before she felt she'd _needed_ to be...be whatever, she didn't know, it didn't matter anymore. She didn't have to...

She shouldn't _need_ to handle it.

"I..." She swallowed, trying to force down the silly pointless nausea while she was at it. "I'm not promising anything, but I'll think about it."

Rhysam just grinned, easy and bright as anything. Then he turned on his heel and started off again, pulling her along with him.

She would like to say she was going to get back at him for _that_ uncomfortable nonsense, but she was pretty sure she was going to end up fucking him again tonight, so.

* * *

"The 'enlightened' mind hasn't truly rejected delusion if delusion is built into the frame of the very concept of enlightenment."

Sitting in their usual corner of the library, Dorak blinked at her, his mind feeling somehow even more cool and placid than usual. He simply stared at her for long moments, seemingly too blindsided to even come up with a response. Finally, low and slow, "I'm not certain I follow."

"Hmm." Cina pulled back a moment, slouching in her stiff, plastic chair — Jedi simply couldn't have comfortable furniture, of course — mulling over exactly how to get the point of her argument across. It was actually a very simple argument, one anyone with passing familiarity with contemporary political and ethical philosophy would grasp intuitively.

The problem was, Jedi thinkers were often shockingly naïve. They were very thoroughly educated, of course, with some significant focus given to ethical philosophy. But it was an institution, a very _old_ institution, burdened as many such institutions were with foundational dogma and existential pressures. While Jedi were quite well-read, their education was in important ways narrow — deep, yes, but they were left completely ignorant of certain influential modes of thought.

Having read a number of Jedi thinkers now, how they made their arguments, even how their Code was ordered, Cina was getting the very clear impression that Jedi were almost entirely ignorant of idealistic nihilism, neostructuralism, and material fatalism. (After all, it was against the Order's self-interest to educate their members in modes of thought that too strongly contradicted their foundational ideology.) Which made formulating a critique of Dorak's argument presupposing an understanding of those ideas very difficult.

"Okay." Cina's fingers tapped at the table a few more times, her frown slowly loosening. "Okay. A person's thinking is, in the main, lazy. This isn't a moral judgement, it's a consequence of evolutionary pressures — the tendency in all things is toward greater efficiency, as the creature that utilises resources most effectively is most likely to survive lean times, and thus most likely to propogate. Similarly, most beings have a tendency toward working with what they already have, what has worked in the past. There is a preference to form arguments and come to conclusions using known quantities already in evidence, to leave current beliefs and understandings unquestioned. All people are susceptible to this, no one can divest themselves of bias entirely."

By the slow, somewhat absent feel of Dorak's nodding, he didn't quite get the point. "Yes, that is so. We are to always be aware of our own limitations, to withhold judgement until we fully understand the particulars."

To a point, anyway — the charge to _Deny Curiosity_ would seem to naturally limit any attempt to fully grasp a situation. But that wasn't the point at the moment. "Sure. But it never seems to occur to any of you that your entire way of thinking is built on flawed premises that should, at times, perhaps be questioned."

And there was that blank stare again.

"You have at least a fundamental understanding of physics. Elementary physics, I mean."

That didn't seem to make him any less confused, still flatly staring at her, but he said, "Yes, of course. It's a part of the standard curriculum."

"And neurology as well, I should think."

"The basics, yes. Biology varies too much between species for it to be worthwhile for any but Healers to spend extensive time on the subject, but I am familiar with the general idea."

Cina nodded. "Has it ever occurred to you that, given the predictable nature of the physical world and the machinery of our brains, that cognition itself may be, at least partially, deterministic?"

It took him a brief moment to respond, staring back at her, eyes and mind quiet and empty. "To a degree, perhaps. But the reality of the Force proves that the mind is not an entirely physical phenomenon."

"Not entirely, but it doesn't have to be. _Part_ of our consciousness may be credited to something...spiritual, if you will, but _part_ of it is certainly physical — there wouldn't be any real consequences to brain damage if it weren't, would there? It would seem, given that our brains function on physical processes that are in principle predictable based on its initial state and outside stimuli, that the _output_ is also predictable. Perhaps not in the particulars, but in the general shape. Yes?"

"I can't reasonably disagree."

"Much as the core of Jedi teaching is fundamentally unreasonable."

That time, it wasn't just blank shock and confusion. Buried in the stillness, she caught a hint of something hotter from Dorak, a spark of uneasiness, concern. "I'm not certain I follow."

"The Jedi argue that someone can _choose_ to strip themselves of..." Cina trailed off, trying to think of the best way to say it. All that shite always sounded so bloody ridiculous to her, she'd honestly not taken that much of it in, certainly not enough to have on hand a succinct way to summarise it all. "...you know, er, attachments, feelings, will. The self, essentially, enlightenment to the Jedi is the denial of all selfish interest in preference for the _will of the Force_ , whatever that's supposed to mean. The thing is, that is physically impossible.

"Jedi are told they must excise themselves of all passions, be they positive or negative, but that is simply _not how brains work_. A person can learn to mediate _external expression_ of emotion — assuming they have the self-control necessary, which is a capacity a person must be born with — but that doesn't make the emotion go away. No matter how much you meditate, or whatever, external stimuli _will_ cause neural activity, which _will_ prompt learned associations, which _will_ cue the secretion of neurochemicals and hormones, which _will_ be experienced as emotion. That is just how it works. It is inescapable, outside of catastrophic brain damage — which I'll grant isn't impossible, childhood psychological trauma could cause disassociation severe enough to preclude any subjective experience of the self, but I _really_ hope that's not what the Order intend to effect in their members.

"To put it very plainly, Master, any Jedi who claims to have achieved the sort of enlightenment the Order requires is lying to themselves. The Jedi concept of 'enlightenment' is inherently delusional; therefore, the 'enlightened' mind, rather than having rejected delusion, has embraced it."

Dorak just stared at her, for a long silent moment, his face smooth and unmoving. Perhaps more than was entirely fair, she was a little impressed to feel that he _was_ actually considering a response, something shifting in her sense of his thoughts, calmer and more thoughtful than she would have given someone in his place credit for. (She was assaulting the very foundation of his worldview and his own self-concept, after all.) Finally, he said, "Perhaps it is a misunderstanding of diction. Yes, it is true that the experience of emotion is entirely unavoidable, but it is not the experience of emotion itself that is problematic."

"You're going to say something about attachment, aren't you?" She did get a flat look at cutting him off, but he just answered with a pleasant nod. "Right. Have you ever considered the self-serving assumptions built into the definition of 'attachment' used by the Jedi? Jedi are, fundamentally, dedicated to the Order, to the Republic — to the Code, the ideology of the Order itself, their sense of achieving this enlightenment of yours. Convenient, that your _attachment_ to these institutions and ideas and your own self-image are excluded from your definition."

Bafflingly, Dorak just seemed amused. He even smiled, thin and soft. "How can one achieve a state free of desire, when that state is itself desired? This isn't a new perspective. Though, you shouldn't speak this way to anyone else. It is anathema — it was decided long ago that such thoughts risk losing a minority to the Dark Side."

It took some effort to keep her eyes from rolling. "And Jedi dogma is evidently perfect as it stands — nobody ever leaves the Order at all ever. Besides, I'm not convinced the Dark Side exists."

There came the hint of unease from Dorak again, though it was tightly controlled this time too, didn't show at all on his face. "I find it hard to believe you haven't ever felt its presence."

"As a destructive, corruptive power outside of myself?" She shrugged. "No. If we are to say the Force is an expression of all life, we might call the actions and feelings that promote the well-being and propagation of life Light, and ones counter to the same Dark. One might then say that using the power of the Force out of destructive motivation to destructive ends might be called the 'Dark Side' — if we call the temptation to do such _feeling its presence_ , then yes, of course I have. But that is a feeling I have, contained to myself, that I can choose whether or not I will act upon. Some people might not have the self-control necessary, I will grant that, but it _is_ an issue of self-control, not one of resisting the influence of some evil aspect of reality itself. The idea is simply absurd."

"Well." Dorak let out a long sigh, eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a moment. "That is another minority viewpoint that has existed in the Order in the past. I do understand where you are coming from. However, it would be best if you do not speak of these thoughts. I feel I will not be able to convince you, set in your views as you are, but I ask you to not...complicate matters for the other students."

Cina snorted. "Yes, I suppose it _is_ harder to brainwash adults, isn't it?"

That just immediately started another argument, of course. She'd known it would, and she probably shouldn't have said it, but he _had_ just said more than once to keep this _heresy_ between the two of them. He probably wouldn't go blabbing about it.

Besides, watching the old bugger squirm was kind of funny.

* * *

Despite all the spiritualist philosophising the Jedi liked to wrap it up in, this Force magic shite wasn't actually that complicated.

They had all their complex jargon and traditions and such, of course, and she was expected to know...not _all_ of it, but at least enough to make it through a conversation, to be able to talk about this stuff in a way anybody else could understand. Anybody else who also knew the jargon, anyway, which would just be Jedi. Not that that was at all unique to the Jedi — any community organised around anything for any purpose developed its own language to discuss matters particular to that community, that was simply how people worked. If Cina wanted to, she could talk for _hours_ in obscure academic speech that would be completely opaque to anyone who'd never spent any time in a graduate linguistics or sociology programme, it wasn't even difficult. Cramming roughly a decade and a half of education into the space of a couple months meant she was essentially being beaten over the head with the entirety of their internal culture all at once and expected to keep up, but the experience wasn't significantly different from walking over to the economics department and sitting in on a lecture, when it came down to it.

Walking into a Bendu monastery would be a better comparison, she guessed, but they didn't tend to lecture at people. Part of that whole universalism thing they had going.

But anyway, the point was, the way Jedi talked about this stuff almost made it all seem far more complicated than it actually was. They had names for everything, and long formalised processes about how everything was supposed to be done — on the actual _magic_ part, anyway, they were very big on the spiritual nonsense when passively sensing things — which as far as Cina could tell was all completely unnecessary.

After all, she hadn't known any of this shite about anakeresis and image potential and transobjectivism and whatever else when she'd thrown her cousin across the library. So far as she could tell, it was all academic posturing and superfluous philosophising. Which, again, wasn't at all unique to the Jedi — some of the nonsense linguists wrote about, honestly...

It wasn't at all difficult, when it came down to it. Once she could feel a thing, through her ridiculous Jedi magic sixth sense thing, she could do pretty much whatever she wanted with it.

 _Theoretically_. The Jedi might make it sound _more_ complicated than it was, but that didn't mean it was necessarily simple.

Moving things around without actually touching them? That wasn't difficult at all. She just kind of... Well, honestly, it was far more difficult to explain how she did it than to actually do it (which was also kind of her point). It wasn't like she was _actually_ pushing or lifting or holding things, that was just... _sort of_ what it felt like. Sort of. Instead of just _touching_ everything with that weird sixth sense thing, like countless fingers brushing against her surroundings, actually using those non-existent hands to do things with. Except, they weren't _hands_ , really, it wasn't like she imagined virtual fingers plucking things up or whatever, it just...

It just _worked_ , okay? There was a reason the Jedi made up their own language to describe this shite, it was impossible to get the idea across clearly in layman's terms.

But Jedi magic shite got _far_ more complicated than just telekinesis.

If Cina were to try to come up with a unified theory of Jedi magic shite, she would say it was all fundamentally the free manipulation of energy. Moving things with your mind was, essentially, transforming Force 'energy' into kinetic energy. That wasn't too conceptually difficult. When things started getting _really_ complicated was when other forms of energy were taken into consideration. Electrical energy was also an option — Cina had started giving Kandosa static shocks when he was being a pain, it took him a couple days to figure out what was happening, hilarious. Jedi _should_ be able to produce light and heat as well, but apparently the fine focus needed to pull that off was tricky. Manipulating light and heat wasn't too hard — because, of course, it was a simple matter to mess with whatever energy already existed in the environment, far easier than creating it from nothing — but she hadn't actually managed to produce those yet.

But those weren't the only kinds of energy. She had a theory, one she hadn't yet seen reflected in anything she'd heard or read: shouldn't it be possible to directly alter or even create _matter?_ Mass was, after all, a form of energy. Elemental recombination had been developed millennia ago, processes to create a particular chemical substance out of an entirely different one through selective nuclear fusion and fission. Under sufficient temperatures and pressures, it was even possible to create undifferentiated quark–gluon plasma which could theoretically be condensed into whatever sort of baryonic matter one wanted (not that that was particularly useful, since most were unstable anyway). Shouldn't it be _possible_ , then, to create matter _ex nihilo_ through the Force, or transmute one element or chemical into another at will? Granted, the magnitude of the energies involved would be immense, and it would be all too uneasy for someone to accidentally incinerate themselves from waste heat, but _still_...

She wouldn't be playing with it — if she fucked up, she could only accidentally destroy the entire bloody town. But it was undeniably an interesting thought.

And the thought of turning one thing into another thing gave her other ideas.

Her lightsaber combat lessons were, in a way, far simpler than the rest of what they had her learning. There had been a bit of rote instruction at the beginning, with a bevy of terminology and basic forms and somesuch, but that was only intended to be a foundation to build from. Developing one's personal technique from there was an ad hoc process, done through practice and experience. This experience mostly consisted of getting burns all over the place, over and over and over. There was a big arena, sort of, under the Enclave, a wide, high-ceilinged room where various Jedi spent hours a day flailing at each other with practice lightsabers.

Personally, Cina thought the practice ones were really bloody neat — the technology behind a plasma 'blade' that, instead of slicing straight through flesh as easy as anything else, simply bounced off leaving a burn behind was actually _far_ more complicated than a normal lightsaber. As she understood it, it involved some combination of force fields and repulsors, it was fascinating.

Of course, that meant practice lightsabers actually used _more_ power than normal ones, and it was all complicated enough that designing one device that could perform both modes with any sort of reliability wasn't at all practical. But still, it was neat.

While Lestin had taught her the basics, he wasn't the person she got to practice against. Sometimes it was random Jedi at the Enclave — which was a bit humiliating, when she got her arse handed to her by small children, as had happened uncountable times by now — but her most frequent sparring partner was Bastila bloody Shan.

Cina still wasn't sure what she was supposed to think about Shan. She was an irritating little self-righteous chit, of course, with a dangerously over-inflated estimation of her own competence in anything that didn't have to do with ridiculous Jedi spiritualist nonsense. But Cina couldn't deny she'd been...less aggressively awful since they'd landed on Dantooine. No idea why. Maybe being on familiar ground had simply mellowed her out some, who knows. Which meant she trended more toward boring than annoying these days, but still, she got the impression Shan was _trying_ to be nice to her.

Having spent most of her life a Jedi, she had no bloody clue how to go about being nice to someone, but it was clear she was trying. Which was just sort of confusing.

But Cina didn't waste too much time puzzling over the silly girl — she was unlikely to come to any satisfying answers, and it wasn't truly important enough to linger over. Instead, standing in one of the cleared spaces in the cavernous hall, Cina prepared herself for the coming fight, drawing slow breaths, bouncing slightly on the pads of her feet. She was almost painfully tense, a nervous energy she could hardly contain, while Shan just stared flatly back at her, completely impassive, her borrowed practice saber held loosely at her side, waiting.

Not that the difference in their composure was at all unexpected. Cina might find the magic shite angle intuitive and really quite easy, but the whole...swinging lightsabers...thing? _That_ she wasn't at all comfortable with yet. She had every reason to be anxious, and Shan had none — after all, they both knew exactly who would be ending up with all the burns by the end.

Throwing caution to the winds, Cina darted forward, throwing the first blow of today's spar — it didn't really make any difference in the end, and if she left it up to Shan there was no telling how long they'd stand there staring at each other. She moved faster than _should_ be possible, power flowing in from everywhere and nowhere granting her inhuman speed, but she wasn't quick enough. With a shuddering protest of tightly-focused repulsors and superheated air, a beam of pale white appeared directly in her path, halting Cina's own borrowed practice saber a foot from Shan's face. Shan slipped away to the right, turning Cina's weight aside, wrist turning to slash in toward Cina's stomach, but she'd already stepped back out of the way.

And Shan pressed forward, the heavy thrumming blade falling again and again, varying angle and direction, again and again unceasing. Cina managed to avoid or block all of them, but they were coming too fast, she could barely keep up, couldn't even attempt to counter properly.

Which was getting Cina very frustrated very quickly. It didn't help that, judging by the ease of her posture and the blankness of her face, Shan wasn't even trying very hard. And her casual, one-handed blows were shockingly _heavy_ , crashing down on Cina so hard she had to work to halt them, gripping tight with both hands, leaning into the impacts with gritted teeth, even then sometimes forced to stumble back, the force just too much for her to easily take. Turning them aside was far easier, redirecting the blows instead of trying to absorb them, but sometimes Cina took them at the wrong angle, or Shan would catch her flat-footed, sometimes she just didn't have a choice in the matter.

That was just sort of odd, when she thought about it: Shan _shouldn't_ be stronger than her. Okay, _physically_ , maybe — Cina was rather small, and fit as she might be Shan had been actively fighting a bloody war until very recently — but once the Force got involved that really shouldn't matter so much. She was leaning into it a bit, pushing power not her own into her limbs, she could probably throw Kandosa across the hold one-handed, but Shan was _still_ so much stronger. It was possible Shan was just more powerful than her, she guessed, but...

For some reason, Cina doubted it. Some intuition left over from the person she'd once been, perhaps something she'd picked up from the Jedi around her, she _knew_ she was good at this Force shite. From those flashes of fear she still picked up from Shan on occasion, the unease from the Masters who actually knew who she was, she'd once been exceptional. There was simply no way Shan was just better than her.

Maybe this physical stuff had been her weak point — that felt right, somehow, she couldn't say how, it just seemed like a thing that should be true. And she _was_ out of practice.

But it was still frustrating.

Frustrating enough that, when Shan finally caught her out, a streak of white coming in at Cina's right shoulder she knew she wouldn't be able to catch in time, she didn't even think. Bitter and annoyed and already growing shaky and tired, she didn't consider what she was doing, hardly even realising she was doing anything at all, she just _did_.

When the blade hit her, heat and light so intense it sang, she pulled it past her skin and into her, pulled so hard the practice lightsaber flickered, for a moment she was all too full of it, feeling light and hot and _powerful_ , and she took it, she _twisted_ it, and she _pushed_ —

A brief crackle of electricity, the taste of ozone, a deafening bang, and Shan was struck in the chest by a flash of lightning, thrown to tumble limp to the floor.

For a moment, in the sudden, shocked silence of the hall, Cina could only stand there. Frozen, she stared at the steaming palm of her open hand, dumbfounded.

What the _fuck_...

She snapped out of it after a few seconds — she'd just, _somehow_ , conjured a bolt of lightning out of nothing...and hit Shan with it. "Oh, _shite_." Her practice lightsaber dropped from her other hand, blinking out and falling to the floor, and she darted after Shan, sliding to her knees over her smoking form an instant after Lestin. "I'm sorry, I didn't— Is she okay?"

"It's alright, Apprentice, she'll be fine." With a deceptively casual flex of effort, Lestin ripped apart Shan's scorched robes with his bare hands, baring her chest. "Ah, yes. See," he said, one finger hovering over her reddened, sickeningly rippling skin, "she turned the worst of it aside at the last instant. Painful, yes, but not permanently damaging."

Cina frowned to herself. It looked like it had struck just there, a blackened and bleeding blotch along the ridge of her ribs, low on the right. What looked much like a burn, shiny and red and uneven, turned down toward her hip, the width of her hand before fracturing into a thousand much smaller filaments, switchbacking across her skin in a thick web, looking oddly like the tines of a snowflake. It didn't look pleasant, but it was rather less damage than she would have expected, with how loud and bright that flash of electricity had been. Shan must have done _something_ — which was seriously bloody impressive, considering she would have had only a split second to do it in.

Though, she felt something...odd. She could always feel people there, through this ridiculous Force magic shite — she usually ignored it, it could be very distracting — but something about Shan felt different than usual. Slower, and quieter, but not any dimmer, somehow... "Is that a healing trance?" She'd heard of such things, had learned the theory, but she'd never actually seen one in action, or done it herself. The person _did_ actually have to be injured for it to work properly, after all.

"Yes, it is — she went under instinctively, I would guess. She'll wake up much more quickly if we help her along," Lestin added, one hand moving over the burn, something in her sense of him shifting, focusing, flaring.

But Cina was having an idea. Before Lestin could hardly get going, she reached out for her abandoned practice saber, ordered it to _come_ — the hilt slapped against her palm a second later. Turning it around backwards, Cina flicked it on, the beam of pale light snapping into existence, pointing back behind her. With a last long breath, preparing herself for the insane thing she was about to do as well as she could, she pressed the guarded blade against her hip. And she _pulled_.

Again, foreign energy poured into her, light and heat filled to bursting, and before she could draw in more than she could hold she turned it about and _pushed_ , forcing it out into Shan. She didn't concern herself overmuch with the details, just willed Shan to be healed, threw everything she had at it — the Jedi noted that, much as could happen in physics at sufficiently high energy levels, throw enough power at something and the rules could be bent. Healing was normally a very delicate art, mostly done by coaxing the body to fix itself, requiring thorough anatomical knowledge and intense concentration to do properly. But throw enough power at it and, well, Cina had the feeling she could skip all that.

Under a sudden wash of white-gold light, the char vanished, the burns rapidly retreating, Shan's skin paling back to its original colour, in bare seconds once again smooth and unblemished. Cina cut off the flood of power, the light winking out, when Shan drew in a sharp breath, half-sitting before she noticed Lestin in the way, fell back again.

Then Cina winced, her arm spasming, the practice lightsaber tumbling to the floor again. She nearly clamped a hand over her hip before catching herself — _shite_ , that _hurt_. She'd stopped pulling the heat out of the thing and, like a complete bloody idiot, forgot where it'd been coming from in the first place. Gritting her teeth against the flat, constant pain emanating from a thick strip across her leg, she glanced down, saw she'd held it there long enough she'd completely burned through her trousers. And she'd probably been pressing it down _hard_ enough she'd probably— Oh, yep, looking through the gap, that was _definitely_ a second-degree burn. Fuck.

Eh, whatever. She was still very new at this magic shite, but she could heal something that small no problem — a brief moment of concentration and she had her body working on it, the pain ticking down considerably after only a few seconds. (It'd be some hours before it was gone completely, this Jedi healing thing just numbed the area a bit while it was at it.) No big deal. This was nowhere _near_ as bad as what Shan had had a second ago, and she'd done it to herself like an idiot, this was fine.

"Tutaminis."

She twitched, attention drawn away from her leg (and her own bloody stupidity) back up to Lestin. He was giving her an odd look, one of those ones he got now and again. Nostalgic, almost, unwillingly amused — she assumed he got that look when she reminded him of...well, herself, but she'd never asked after it. "What?"

"Transforming one form of energy into another. That's called tutaminis."

"Oh." She blinked. "I didn't even really mean to, it just kind of happened. I'll go out on a limb and assume the old me had a talent for that."

"Quite." No _almost_ about his amusement now, that crooked smile was unmistakable.

"Yes, now we know what happened." Shan's voice was thin, slightly shaky, heavy with the edge of a cough. "Let's avoid doing that again."

"Right, of course, sorry." This was probably a terrible, terrible idea, but Cina couldn't help it. A smirk twitching at her lips, she said, "Hey, it could have been worse. I could have set you on fire or something."

For some reason, Shan didn't seem to think that was funny.

* * *

As unimpressive as Dinar Enai was, the local medical facilities were commensurately humble. According to the directory, the only thing the sleepy little town had approaching a hospital did have a fully supplied operative theatre — if she recalled correctly, every incorporated settlement in the Republic was required to have at least one — but by Core standards the place was hardly passable as a community clinic. She was pretty sure it was actually smaller than Forn's back on Taris.

Though, the waiting room, a tiny little thing with sitting room for only six people, was rather more...colourful, she guessed, than most such things she'd seen before, which, when she thought about it, wasn't too surprising. The more different people shared a space the less personality it inevitably reflected, so as to remain neutral — this clinic hosted a relatively small number of professionals, so some hints of their personal expression still had room to slip through. None of the furniture matched, a couple chairs of plain wood that was probably native right across from faded, patched upholstery that might have been brought in with the original colonists a century ago, the walls painted with vibrant, switchbacking strips of red and blue, creating a sharp contrast against the plotted plants here and there, vines crawling along frames nestled high against the ceiling, greens and browns and yellows with flowers in deep reds and purples.

The choice was peculiar, enough that Cina spent a good portion of her wait, seven minutes or so sitting in the room alone, staring at the plants all over the place, possible explanations flicking through her head. A glance back toward the reception desk, the board displaying the names and specialties of the staff, confirmed her guess: of the eight doctors working out of this clinic, six were HoʻDin. At least, the names _could_ be HoʻDin — there was enough linguistic diversity around the galaxy it was impossible to be sure — but it would certainly explain the plants everywhere. The HoʻDin _were_ serious about their botany, and they were from this region of space, it seemed likely. There was even a religious aspect to it, she thought, but she wasn't certain what — HoʻDin were relatively new to the wider galaxy, she didn't actually know that much...about them.

Cina frowned to herself. She _didn't_ know that much about them. She couldn't remember the last time she'd stumbled across a species or culture she was only passingly familiar with. She didn't speak the language either, she just had a vague impression of what their names looked like. She had the weird feeling the old her had never met a HoʻDin. Which wasn't unexpected, when she thought about it — the HoʻDin were comparatively new to the galactic community, and very few had elected to leave their homeworld. They hadn't even officially joined the Republic yet, she didn't think. It wasn't so odd that she might not have ever run into one before.

The thought was still a little strange, though. She'd grown accustomed to the old her having known everything about everyone, inheriting from her languages and cultural knowledge she couldn't remember learning. It was odd, drawing a blank. Almost unsettling.

After sitting there waiting for a few minutes, the door further into the clinic swept open, a call of her name. Cina was somewhat surprised when, instead of being brought straight back to the doctor she'd arranged the appointment to see, she was given a quick physical — a list of questions on family and medical history, simple things like quick checking her height and weight, a perfunctory physical examination, even more involved things like blood labs and a test she didn't know the name of, but she assumed the point of arcing a low charge through her like that was intended to measure bodily composition, only thing that made sense. She was a bit baffled, at first.

Though it did make perfect sense, once she thought about it a moment. Physical health and mental health weren't entirely separate, after all, and, well, she wasn't even entirely certain she _had_ legitimate medical records. The Jedi had certainly faked some, constructing her false identity, but they would be with the CHS back on Alderaan, which Cina doubted this little frontier clinic would have access to in any case. So, it wasn't unreasonable, she just went along with it.

Even if the questions she was asked were difficult to answer. She certainly _did_ have family and personal medical history that might or might not be relevant — everybody did, after all — but she obviously couldn't remember whatever it was. She knew Cianen Hayal's, of course, but she rather doubted the Jedi had composed their fiction with reproducing an accurate medical background in mind. Some questions she could answer, whether she personally had this condition or that, allergies and the like, but many she had no bloody clue. Most of her answers ended up being variations on _I don't know_ , which would really just have to be good enough.

After some minutes of that, she was led back out into the hall, where they nearly ran right into Peejiʻ, who'd clearly been waiting for them to finish. The psychiatrist was _definitely_ a HoʻDin — Cina hadn't ever met one before, but they were rather...unique looking. Twig-thin and long-limbed, rough, scaly skin a peculiar greenish-yellow with a few more orangeish patches here and there — especially around the joints, his spindly hands the darkest, almost red in places — elongated, solemn face, set with gleaming pitch-black eyes, topped with a tangle of these strange...purplish...tentacle...things? (Cina had seen images before, but they somehow looked even weirder in person.) HoʻDin in general tended to be tall, this Peejiʻ especially so, bent nearly double to keep his head comfortably below the ceiling, he had to be nearly three metres high, looming over Cina and the Elomin assistant.

Though his frankly ominous appearance was dispelled the instant Peejiʻ opened his mouth. His voice was pitched rather low to match his stature, but he spoke softly and slowly, his introduction remarkably self-effacing — Cina wasn't certain she'd ever met a medical doctor who didn't draw attention to the fact that they were one, he didn't even use the title — gently taking one hand in both of his, asking what she wanted to be called, even what sort of gendered language she preferred, which was weird. Most professionals didn't bother asking humans that, since the native vocabulary of Basic _was_ designed for human use; when she asked after it, Peejiʻ just joked that he'd rather be safe than slip up, he wouldn't want to offend someone just because he wasn't as familiar with their species as he might be.

...Now that she thought about it, Cina had absolutely no idea what the HoʻDin sex and gender system was like. None of the images she'd seen of HoʻDin had shown any obvious distinctions that could be interpreted as primary or secondary sexual characteristics...but then it _wasn't_ always obvious, was it? (In fact, it _often_ wasn't, humans featured a relatively high degree of sexual dimorphism compared to other sapient species.) Not to mention, she had absolutely no idea how HoʻDin reproduction worked, it was altogether possible they didn't even have multiple sexes, or might have _more_ than two — the male-female binary humans were familiar might be _frequently_ applicable, but it wasn't always, even things this basic varied quite a lot across the galaxy.

Eh, the receptionist had referred to Peejiʻ as _he_ , she'd just run with that.

After a brief exchange with the tech who'd taken her physical, Peejiʻ turned to lead her off, his gliding pace surprisingly graceful. Soon they were stepping into his office — Peejiʻ himself had to awkwardly duck sideways to fit through the frame — all the decoration in the little room botanical, greens and purples and blues and yellows, the walls practically covered, only a few of the plants recogniseable. (She assumed they were imported from his homeworld, but she truly didn't know enough to tell.) Peejiʻ waved her toward a little sofa, sinking into his own chair only once she'd sat.

Leaning back in his chair, his overlong legs casually crossed at the ankle, he poked at a datapad for a moment. Probably looking through the results of that physical, the survey she'd filled out ahead of the appointment. After a minute or two, he set it aside, folding his hands in his lap and turning back to her with a thin smile. "So, Cina, what brings you to me?"

She wasn't entirely sure how she was supposed to concisely answer that question. "I believe the term is _persistent depressive affective disturbance_."

Peejiʻ's smile widened somewhat, revealing symmetrical rows of flat, squarish teeth. "Yes, that is the phrase you find in books. Theory may be useful in growing to understand such things, but in the clinical setting the realities of the personal experience always supercede these strict terms."

She nearly asked if he enjoyed having another academic as a patient, so he had an excuse to use language like that, but that would be completely unhelpful. "I figured the questionnaire I had to fill out would have answered that well enough."

"In limited ways, such things are helpful, but those limits must be acknowledged. That questionnaire, it tells me the what, but not the how." His smile widened again. "You are familiar enough with my field to know terms like _persistent depressive affective disturbance_ ; you must know there are good reasons we actually talk to patients."

"Yes, I know. But it would be completely pointless in my case."

"I realize it can be very uncomfortable, but if you wish to—"

"No, I mean, there's simply nothing to gain from talking about anything about my life, because none of it matters." At the blank, confused stare she was getting, Cina let out a hard sigh, eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a second. (This was an awful idea, how had Rhysam talked her into this...) "My own memories are all fake. The Jedi implanted a constructed personality in my head. Everything I remember before about, say, four months ago or so, it's all fiction, none of it happened. I suspect the...whatever, is carrying over from the old me, who I barely remember at all, so there is simply nothing to talk about."

Cina still wasn't convinced this was a good idea, she didn't really want to be here, but the absolutely dumbfounded look on Peejiʻ's face was _almost_ worth it.

* * *

She ducked and spun, the heavy thrum of a lightsaber passing just over her head, bringing her own around again as she stood, smoothly coming in under Bastila's guard. She was moving fast enough, the practice blade hit Bastila in the chest hard enough it was nearly torn from her grip and Bastila let out her breath in a shocked gasp, stumbling back a couple steps. Her hand coming up to the scorch mark across the front of her robes, Bastila just stared at her for a short moment.

Once again — so faint it was barely there, the merest hint on the air, the slightest quiver in her fingers — Cina knew Bastila was fighting down that inexplicable fear she had of her. She'd gotten better at suppressing it, it wasn't nearly as obvious as it'd been on Taris and these little flashes didn't last as long as they once had. But they still happened.

(Cina still had no idea what that was about, but just coming out and asking would probably be a terrible idea.)

For a long moment, they stared at each other in peculiar tense silence, broken only with the thrums and snaps and gasps of other sparring pairs around the cavernous hall going at it. Something was going on in Bastila's head, she could tell, though not what. Cina was trying to keep herself from smiling — she very rarely straight outmatched Bastila in any of their little practice duels, and that had even been a good one, but letting show how pleased she was with herself would probably just make Bastila annoyed or something.

Cina nearly jumped when, rather closer to their circle than the other little duels going on in the room, there was a sudden, sharp sound, after a moment registering as a clap of hands, than another, slow and deliberate, almost mocking applause. She glanced that way to spot Rhysam, staring at the two of them and smirking. When had he shown up? "No reason to be sarcastic, I thought that worked pretty well."

"Well enough, I suppose." His voice was light, casual, but at once with a note of sharp humour. "If the only people you intend to be fighting are half-trained children with over-inflated ideas of their own competence."

Bastila fumed — or, in true Jedi fashion, pointedly _didn't_ fume — and snapped something back at him, but Cina didn't really hear what it was. She was too busy biting her own lip, trying to keep any sign of her amusement from showing. Back on Taris, she'd said similar things to Bastila's face, on multiple occasions. She hadn't been very impressed with Bastila at first — still wasn't, to be honest, but she hadn't been too impressed by most of the rest of the Jedi either. Bastila was really rather ordinary, so far as Cina could tell.

Well, there was that battle meditation thing, supposedly, but Cina still didn't have a clear idea of exactly what that was supposed to be anyway.

Speaking over whatever pointless, snitty argument they were having — Bastila and Rhysam did _not_ get along — Cina said, "You're here to put me in my place, is what you're saying."

Rhysam smirked. "Wouldn't be new, I put you in a lot of places." The suggestive tone on his voice made extremely clear what he meant by that; Bastila scowled. (That she and Rhysam were sleeping together was common knowledge throughout the Enclave by now, and everybody disapproved.) "But no, not really. I just want to see how you're coming along. Besides, sparring is fun, isn't it?"

There were worse things to do with one's time, she guessed. One shoulder lifting in a shrug, "Sure, get up here, then."

Taking Bastila's place in the circle with her, Rhysam held an open hand off to his left, toward the display of practice sabers across the room. A faint sense of power echoing in the air, one zipped over toward him, slapping into his palm — a strangely _large_ one, longer than his forearm. An instant later, it snapped into life, one full-length beam of white light sprouting from either end. With an easy flourish, the thing spun around him, too quickly to follow, the air thrumming with the rapid passing of contained plasma, coming to a stop again tucked under his right armpit, one tip casual hovering in front of his knee. And he smiled at her.

Shite. This was going to suck, she knew it.

Before she could blink, Rhysam was darting forward, the double-ended blade spinning around him so quickly it appeared a solid cage of white light. Cina leaned hard into the Force, her own perception speeding up to meet him, but that damn thing was _still_ moving bloody _fast_ , flipping around on his left, his right, left right left right, she had no idea what direction the first hit was going to come from, so she just jumped out of the way, stumbling a bit in her haste.

Rhysam pivoted, twisting about to follow her with all the smoothness and easy grace of a dancer, his palm darting out to smack against his hilt in mid-flourish, redirecting the thing—

A line of fire carved across her side, the force of the blow pushing her to a knee, a yelp of mixed surprise and pain yanked out of her throat before she could stop it. She clamped a hand over the burn, bidding her body to heal itself without really thinking about it. She hadn't even seen that hit coming. Blinking in a dim sort of daze, she glanced up at Rhysam.

Smiling down at her, dark eyes dancing with amusement.

She felt her own face sink into a glare.

Lunging upward, she slashed across his knees, springing back to her feet, but he'd leaned out of the way, his pivot carrying him around to come in at her back, she barely managed to block the first hit, and that _damn_ staff was vanishing in a dizzying whirl again, she could hardly even see what he was doing, impossible to tell an idle flourish from an actual threat until it was almost too late, the constantly shifting light nearly hiding the set of his shoulders and the shifting of his feet. She acted mostly on instinct, moving almost unconsciously, blocking three more followup hits — not as heavy as Bastila's, but so _fast_ — skipped back from one coming at her knee even as she batted aside another coming for her shoulder an instant later, almost deafened at the riotous sparking as she blocked another and another and another, more and more, she could barely—

Her ankle flared with heat sprung from nowhere, rearing back, taken across the chest an instant later. She crashed onto her back, the breath forced from her lungs. For a few seconds, she could only lay there, her fresh burns smarting even through her amateur self-healing. That bout could hardly have lasted thirty seconds, but she was already sweating, her arms and legs unsteady, breaths shuddering.

But she hardly even noticed — she was far too distracted by shock. Somehow, she hadn't expected Rhysam to be nearly this good with a lightsaber. He always seemed so...soft? She didn't know what she meant, exactly. His light-hearted disdain for Bastila made far more sense now, though. She was all but certain he could lay out Bastila just as easily as he was her. But just _light-hearted_ disdain because, well...

This _was_ Rhysam they were talking about. Which was sort of the point, she simply hadn't seen this coming.

Bastila was apparently just as surprised as Cina was. "Who _are_ you?"

She couldn't see Bastila from here, but she did catch Rhysam at the edge of her vision, shooting a brilliant smile in Bastila's direction. "Rhysam Vile, Jedi Knight. The pleasure's all mine, I assure you."

"It is simply impossible that I would not have heard of a Jedi of your skill fighting with the Republic."

"I believe you just answered your own question, Bastila dear — I haven't been fighting _with_ the Republic. Things like Senates and admirals just complicate things, I feel. There's all kinds of work to be done on the fringes, with the added benefit of not needing to grow accustomed to the taste of hypocrisy."

Bastila started in on a very boring lecture about duty and such at that point. Personally, Cina sympathised with the sentiment of that doubtful smirk Rhysam was wearing, but saying anything would just make Bastila more annoying than necessary. And probably lead to further tedious lectures from Dorak and Tokare — she had reason to suspect Bastila regularly informed the Masters on her, it was better to keep her mouth shut.

Before that could go too long, Cina pushed herself up to sitting, glared up at Rhysam. (She was _not_ pouting, of course not.) "How do you do that, anyway? You move too bloody fast."

He grinned. "You move faster than a human should be able to. How do you do that?"

"Well, the Force, obviously." Not that that was really an answer in itself, but not the point.

"Exactly. See, I can move faster than you because I want it more."

"...What the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?"

His grin shifting into a smirk, Rhysam said, his voice light and bouncing, " _Someone_ 's been reading too many stories for children."

She rolled her eyes.

Then jumped up to her feet, darting in toward him again. Even as he caught the first blow, he laughed, the sound light and gleeful, his eyes sparkling with delight.

The exchange went on for a short moment — lightsabers flashing in a shifting web around the two of them, clashing together in a staccato rhythm so rapid it was almost a constant hiss — before Rhysam got one over on her again, she could see the slash coming, knew she wouldn't be able to twist around to catch it in time. Instead, throwing the power coursing hot through her veins outward, she _pushed_ against the approaching blade. Almost to her own surprise, it froze in place, quivering impotently a foot from her chest. Not pausing a beat, she stabbed forward, expecting to get a free shot, but Rhysam's body swung backward, and _up_ , his hands pushing to spring himself off from his pinned lightsaber, flipping over her head.

She started twisting around, but before she could hardly move, he _pulled_. Her grip loosened in her inattention, his lightsaber shot toward her, switching off the moment before it struck, the hilt harmlessly smacking against her chest before sliding aside, coming into his hand even as his feet hit the ground again.

"Neat trick," he said, "but locking someone down like that leaves you just as vulnerable. _More_ vulnerable, since I want it more."

"Seriously, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"I'm sure you'd figure it out, if you think about it. You've just been taught not to see it."

There was something... _familiar_ , about that...

Cina winced, a hand coming up to rub at the left side of her head before she could stop it.

" _...how you do any of this, I've never heard..."_

" _...that complicated, when you get down to..."_

" _...can't all be like you, no matter how fun that..."_

" _...Masters have to make everything...simple answer is dangerous for the implications we..."_

" _...paranoid...complaining, but I don't see..."_

" _...trick to everything, in the end. It's not enough to let the Force...guidance. It_ _ **is**_ _you, the Force doesn't really have a will of its own, and your subconscious instincts can only carry you so far._

" _You have to_ _ **want**_ _it, Sesai. That's why I can do what I do, and you can't. I want it more than you."_

And Cina understood.

Instead of reaching for the Force, letting it come into her, instead of even pulling at it, she pushed _herself_ into _it_ , she dove deep under the surface, pushed herself further, the power surrounding her thick and bright and almost painfully warm, and she pushed further, and _further_ —

And when she surfaced, she didn't leave it behind. She carried it out with her.

When she surfaced, Rhysam broke into an ecstatic grin, Bastila stared with shock (and a hint of horror Cina probably wasn't supposed to notice), the other sparring pairs stopped and turned, watching, their attention like flies buzzing around her.

She didn't walk so much as she teleported, the power she carried forcing her steps so light she barely noticed them, her practice saber meeting Rhysam's in a shower of sparks, laughter ringing in the air as he blocked a few more, the flurry easy, automatic, until with a flourish he countered, setting her aback. But though he was fast, _so_ fast, so was she — she met each one, not with ease but not nearly so rushed as before either, she could _see them coming_ , she _could do this_...

 _Purple_.

As their blades locked for a moment, just a moment, the brilliant white of the guarded plasma inches from her face, Cina was taken out of the here and now, staring, and she knew, she didn't know how, but she _knew_. Some instinctive part of her, seeing the lightsaber in her own hands, expected to see a different colour.

Purple. Her lightsaber had been purple.

 _And blue_. Her _lightsabers_ had been purple _and blue_.

Cina pushed against his blade, skipped back a step, and _pulled_ —

She turned away one hit, another, another, slapped aside a slash with her bare hand, turned the heat into an invisible punch to the gut, but he spun with the hit, another cut coming in at her off side—

Another practice lightsaber slapped against her palm, sprung to life just in time to meet the blow. Without hardly thinking, Cina spun it down and to the side, stepping forward with a lunge simultaneously, but Rhysam ducked around, coming up to cut open her back. She spun and batted it aside, the motion wide enough she _would_ have left herself open a moment ago, but her newly-acquired second lightsaber was there to cover her, stopping a slash that should have taken her across the middle. And Rhysam pressed the attack, still flourishing and skipping and twisting in a dazzling maelstrom, but...

It was shockingly easy, to fall into the rhythm of it. It'd taken her _weeks_ to figure out this lightsaber thing, and she'd never even tried to use two at once yet, one would _think_ it would be inherently more complicated, one would _think_ it'd take more effort to keep everything straight. But it was easy, countering Rhysam's elegant, swirling dance with a careful, methodical defence, using one saber as cover to give the other time to reorient toward whatever she wanted to do with it next, sometimes breaking it up just to switch the pattern, hopefully throw Rhysam off balance, she barely had to even think about, she just _did_ it.

Somewhere in here, at a level she wasn't fully conscious of most of the time, she remembered.

And even as the pace accelerated, the two of them surrounded with an impenetrable contorting screen of white plasma, even as the fight became more than physical, the Force frothing into action around them, lightning and fire, curses to sap strength and speed, to force the other into sleep, or into fear, or into hallucination, formed by one only to be countered by the other, the air around them turned alternately cold and hot, shattering and hissing with barely contained power, even as it all became all the more intense second to second Cina cared less and less. She didn't know if she would win, she didn't know if she _could_ , and in the moment it didn't matter the slightest bit.

The power flooding through her was intoxicating, yes, making her feel at once heavier and lighter than she once was, as though the earth should shake at her footsteps yet as though she needn't step at all, she could float away if she wanted, she could do _anything_ , but it wasn't that, not really.

She'd known, before, it'd long been evident that the person she'd been was still here. According to Lestin, she still _was_ the person she'd been, in most ways that mattered, she just couldn't remember any of it. She'd known that, rationally. But, as the thrum of passing sabers shook her to the bone, as the Force seared her from the inside out, painful but exhilarating, as sorcery — the twisting of the power at the centre of all the universe into shapes meant to bless or curse, contort one thing into another — as it all came pouring back as though it'd never left, she _knew_ it, in a way that hadn't quite been made clear to her before.

They'd tried to destroy her, once. To recreate her as someone that better suited their purposes. They'd failed.

They _couldn't_ succeed. Even if she fucked it up, even if they decided she didn't and never would meet their absurd standards, it didn't matter. There was nothing they could do to her.

Because, as her and Bastila's shared vision and their own conclusions on the matter had suggested, they _needed_ her. If they wanted to stop Alek, they needed her. They could attempt to recreate her again, but they'd likely end up with the same result. And they hadn't the time to do it all over again, the Republic would fall in the meanwhile. No, they needed her, her as she was, they _must_ work with her, no matter how much they distrusted her, no matter how much they disliked her.

She remembered, at least a little bit. And there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

They had no power over her, not really. They might not have realised that yet, in fact she was certain they hadn't, but _she_ had.

The realisation was overwhelmingly, intoxicatingly liberating.

As their play fight went on, at this point more a vicious dance than any real attempt at defeating the other, Cina's laughter rose to meet Rhysam's, their voices thick and bright with the song of the universe.

* * *

[ _the sun, significantly brighter than Zelle_ ] — _The star Zeltros orbits is called "Zel" in canon, but I changed it mostly for conlang-related reasons. Coruscant's sun would be much more luminous than Zelle, though Zeltros also orbits much closer, so the observed difference on-planet would be smaller than one might think at first, but it would still be very noticeable. Sunlight on Coruscant would have seemed much brighter and much bluer to Sesai until he adjusted._

[idealistic nihilism, neostructuralism, and material fatalism] — _The first is essentially just anti-idealism, a hard rejection of the belief that human experience or concepts are a meaningful reflection of reality (basically the opposite of Kant and Plato). The second is basically just real-world post-structuralism (the term is even from an explanation of Derrida's philosophy I found on wikipedia), particularly concerning deconstruction. (Cina's use of "framing" is even similar to post-structuralist arguments I've heard before.) The last is essentially just fatalism as a consequence of hard materialism...obviously._

[HoʻDin] — _Wookieepedia suggests HoʻDin really only started getting out into the wider galaxy in the last few centuries before the movies...except for a random HoʻDin appearing in one of the_ Lost Tribe of the Sith _novellas, which was a good five thousand years earlier. (SW canon is horribly inconsistent at times.) But, well, it's worth noting that the HoʻDin homeworld is very, very close to a system labelled Ord Biniir. Like, the dots are practically on top of each other on the map. As I've mentioned before, the "ord" worlds were originally settled as military/supply bases to support Republic expansion in the Pius Dea era, seven thousand years before KotOR. I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't have found the HoʻDin in all that time._

[Peejiʻ's] — _The use of the apostrophe in HoʻDin names I'm interpreting as an exotic consonant that doesn't have a neat analogue in our alphabet. (The symbol I switched in is actually stolen from the romanization for_ ع _in Arabic.) This makes the possessive form look kinda silly but... Well, I could have used something fucking weird like_ h̭ _or some shit, but then I'd have to explain why it's suddenly Hoh̭Din, and we'd get this note anyway. Besides, that they're supposed to stand in for some exotic consonant is the_ _ **most**_ _charitable explanation I can think of for the overuse of apostrophes in fantasy/sci-fi names, honestly, what the fuck._

* * *

 _This chapter stands as proof that Sesai thinks he's funny._

 _Over a month since last post, I know. Work and depression are bitches. Trying to write more consistently, but, well, no guarantees._

 _Juhani should be...maybe the next but probably the chapter after next, which means three or four more in the Dantooine arc. Wheee? Wee._


	15. Drawing Lines — V

_Lesami didn't know how long she'd been here._

 _It had to be daytime, again. She was too far underground to actually see the sky, of course, but some small fraction of light penetrated the snows and ice all the way down to the caves, the microscopic bits of ilusite in the walls scintillating in the near-complete darkness, stars in the night. Those lights were all she could see, enough to sketch out the general shape of the space around her, if not the details._

 _She had had a torch, when she'd been sent into the caves, but it'd run out of power some time ago. She hadn't been carrying any water — other initiates had, but it was a simple matter for her to just melt some of the ice around her, she hadn't bothered bringing any — but she had run out of food, what felt like days ago now. It_ had _been days, judging by the cyclical lightening and darkening of the caves around her. For a while there she'd felt dreadfully hungry, worse than she'd ever been before, it'd_ hurt _, but after a time, she didn't know how long, it'd gradually faded away. Instead she only felt weak, and tired._

 _She'd been sitting here, leaning against a random wall, where she'd finally allowed herself to sleep. She'd woken up some hours ago, but she hadn't moved. She sat, and waited._

 _Waited..._

 _She hadn't felt it._

 _They'd been brought to Ilum, she and a crop of other initiates — most significantly younger than her, to her continued embarrassment — pointed at the caves. It wouldn't be easy, they were told, they would be confronted with visions and challenges of some kind, but one of the crystals would call to them, in time. One they were to build their own lightsabers around. It was a rite of passage, one of the oldest in the Jedi tradition, continually maintained for nearly twenty millennia now. Whenever circumstances allowed it, every Jedi made the pilgrimage to Ilum, went into the caves, waited for the call. It was their turn._

 _She hadn't felt it. She could feel the Force, of course, lensing from the bits of crystal all around concentrating it, the air thick with it, crackling just at the edge of hearing. But she'd been down here for days now, had to be a week at least, waiting, reaching for guidance, giving herself dozens of headaches in the process — one particularly intense vision had made her vomit up the last of her food — waiting and waiting and_ waiting _, but..._ _ **nothing**_ _._

 _Nothing. She could feel everything around her, the whispers and echoes reverberating throughout crystals kilometres all around, she could taste the universe flowing through her veins, but none of it spoke to her, none of them meant for her._

 _And she waited..._

 _Lesami didn't know how long she'd been sitting here. She wasn't sure she wanted to get up. She didn't much see the point._

 _All the other initiates must be back by now — if for no other reason, she doubted any of them would have been able to survive down here this long on their own. Lestin must be wondering what was taking her so long. Alek must be worrying. But she couldn't, she couldn't go back, with nothing to show for it. With all the little kids returning successfully — most of them had, at least, she'd felt the resonance as each found the crystal meant for them, sympathetic echoes shivering through her surroundings, she hadn't been counting but there couldn't be many who hadn't done it — she couldn't go back. She knew what they would say, or pointedly_ not _say, she knew how they would look at her, she_ couldn't _, not again, she was just..._

 _...waiting..._

 _They all expected her to fail, she knew that. Perhaps not at this specific point along the way, but she could see it in their eyes, she heard them whisper when they thought she couldn't, she knew._

 _She didn't belong here. She never had, not from the first day she'd arrived on Coruscant. She just... Maybe there was something wrong with her, she didn't know, but she just couldn't make it_ work _. The whole Jedi thing. She couldn't believe in it all like they did, she couldn't get it to make sense in her head, she_ couldn't _, she didn't think it would ever happen. Sometimes, she couldn't even convince herself that was a bad thing, but other times..._

 _(She_ hated _failing, always had, as long as she could remember, she couldn't even remember why, she just_ hated _it.)_

 _If she couldn't be a Jedi, what was she supposed to do?_

 _She had nowhere else to go._

 _She couldn't go back._

 _She was_ supposed _to belong with the Jedi. That was the whole reason her family had sent her here in the first place, after all. People who were like her, who could understand, who could teach her how to...be, like this. But, if anything, it was_ worse _here, there was no escaping it, there was no place for her here, and there was no avoiding that fact, she..._

 _That blackness, that constant weight she couldn't escape, it settled over her, harder and heavier than normal, manifesting within her as a hot tightness, her breaths thin through a throat that didn't want to let it pass, a chest that didn't want to move just now, thanks, and outside her as skeletal fingers, shadows thrown against the twinkling lights of the caves, she planted her forehead against her knees, wrapped her arms around her ankles, she didn't want to see them, she couldn't..._

 _She couldn't go back home. Even if they would take her back — and she wasn't certain they would, they might just send her off to Coruscant all over again — she didn't think she could bear it. She didn't know if she'd even be able to look at her parents without..._

 _They'd_ sent her away _._

 _She'd_ begged _them not to, and they'd_ done it anyway _._

 _(They didn't want her.)_

 _She was supposed to belong here, but she didn't, it would never work. She would never be a Jedi._

 _(Nobody wanted her.)_

 _But she couldn't go back._

 _She_ couldn't _._

 _This was it, the critical moment, and she was stuck. There was nowhere for her to go._

 _She wondered, had wondered for hours now, if it wouldn't be better if..._

 _...she just..._

 _...stayed._

 _Here._

 _If she just laid down..._

 _...and never got up._

 _So she waited..._

 _The thought had been rather terrifying, when it'd first occurred to her, wandering about fruitlessly in these stupid endless caves. Though it wasn't an entirely foreign thought — she had considered killing herself before. Just, random thoughts in idle moments, it'd never really been serious, just..._

 _Well, one time, she guessed. A year or so ago, she'd been in an exterior corridor of one of the sub-plaza levels, making her way back to her room from a theory lecture, about the Dark Side and the Order's place in relation to it, and she must have been feeling more...more than usual, because she'd noticed the window panels could be unlatched, and she'd stood there, looking down into the depths of the Coruscanti undercity, and..._

 _It'd been terrifying, maybe the most scared she'd ever felt, before. She'd stared out the window, down down down, and she'd thought, she could...just..._

 _It would only take a second. Just one step, and..._

 _She didn't have to do this any more._

 _She was so_ tired _._

 _The thought had been scary, so scary her fingers had been shaking, but at the same time..._

 _It'd come back, after she'd been down here a day or so, and at first it'd been terrifying. And she couldn't get away from it, not like she had last time, surprise and shame chasing her away from the windows when a couple Knights turned the corner, no, it was_ everywhere _. No part of the caves was any different than any other, really. Last time, the thought had been focused on a single place, a single thing, but here it was diffuse, she carried it with her no matter how far she walked, the thought growing heavier and heavier with every step._

 _Until when, after lying down, it was so heavy she simply couldn't convince herself to get up._

 _It wasn't even that scary, anymore. She'd almost gotten used to it, she thought, the idea of just..._

 _...stopping._

 _She didn't have to do this anymore. The whole...everything._

 _She didn't have to go back._

 _She was so_ tired _. She could, just, stay here..._

 _...and wait..._

 _...to die._

 _She had felt a bit guilty about it, for a little while. There_ were _people who would miss her, if she were gone. Alek and Nisotsa. Cariaga, Talvon, Sesai, Ac̳ika. Probably even Arren, though she'd never admit it. Shite, if Lesami just never came back Lestin would get in a lot of trouble — she somehow doubted the Council would be happy with Masters just losing kids down here. Even if it was just her. And, well, her family would definitely throw a fit (assuming the Jedi bothered telling them)._

 _But just for a little while._

 _They'd be fine without her. Alek and Nisotsa, well, they'd already been... She was a terrible influence, she knew that, both their masters had been trying to get them to distance themselves from her. (Nobody had said anything, but they didn't have to, she just knew.) They hadn't had a lot of success so far, but..._

 _It would be easier, for them, if she weren't around._

 _Cariaga and Talvon, they'd be fine. Sesai and Ac̳ika...would get over it. Arren and Lestin, well, they'd been doing this Jedi thing for decades, they weren't meant to care, they'd definitely get over it._

 _And her family, honestly, if they made some political difficulty for the Order, maybe made other families more wary of handing their kids over, that just sounded like a benefit to her. It might hurt them but, when she thought about it, she didn't care._

 _In fact, if it did,_ good _, they deserved it._

 _They'd sent her away. She'd begged them not to, and they'd done it anyway._

 _(This was all their fault, really, when it came down to it.)_

 _She'd felt guilty at first, but it'd faded before too long._

 _And now she just lay here, hungry and cold, and so_ tired _..._

 _...and she waited._

"— _not like_ this _, you don't—"_

 _Face pulling into a grimace, Lesami covered her ears with her hands. She could feel the Force swirling about her, pushing into her, a dull ache already starting in her temple, bile just starting to crawl up her throat. She guessed if she had to pick a place to wait to die, this was a shite one — she_ hated _Force visions, they always made her feel awful._

" _You're_ not allowed _to just die like this, Revan, not if I have anything to say about it, I swear, I'll—"_

" _Go away." Lesami pressed harder, not that it would accomplish anything — the voices were_ inside _her head, not sound she could keep out. She felt tears prick at her eyes, was momentarily embarrassed before realising she was alone, obviously, it wasn't like anyone was going to see her anyway. "Just leave me alone."_

" _I guess I owe you one, Sami."_

"Fuck _, that was close..."_

" _Next time maybe I'll—"_

"— _I didn't even see—"_

" _Nice work, Commander."_

"— _wouldn't have made that call, but—"_

"— _more than enough—"_

 _The voices grew louder and louder, more and more, that point in her head throbbing with each syllable, and even with her eyes closed she could see the twinkling of the crystals now—_

" _I thought we were done for."_

"— _made it in time."_

"— _do a lot of good for—"_

"— _more complicated, but it'll be worth it."_

" _Thank you—"_

"— _can't even—"_

"— _owe our lives—"_

"— _can to repay—"_

— _but it wasn't the crystals in the walls, with each voice crowding into her head flared a point of light, tiny and ephemeral, but distinct and brilliant, as the words echoed through her they came with a thread, a tiny glowing line of fate, connecting the little light to her, warm and secure, and..._

 _The voices were growing so many, so loud, she couldn't keep them apart, it took her a long moment to realise what was happening._

 _People. Each light was a person, a person she would help. Who would die, if not for her._

 _As the seconds dragged by, the voices filling her head until she thought it would burst, too_ many _, she grit her teeth against the pain, but it_ wouldn't stop _..._

 _There were so_ many _. Hundreds..._

 _..._ millions _..._

 _The threads connecting them to her engulfed her entirely, and she just curled more tightly into herself, tried to pull away. There were_ too _many, it was too much, she couldn't carry all that, it was too heavy, and she was so_ tired _, she just—_

" _BUIKA!"_

 _All the other voices cut off just in time to leave the shrill scream alone, sudden and intense enough Lesami started. She looked up, glanced around, saw only the sheer darkness of the caves, broken only with those tiny twinkles of ilusite. (And the not-lights of this damn vision, seen-but-not-seen, quiet and watching.) That was a child's voice, though far from the only one, but this feeling somehow closer and...more urgent? Or perhaps it was simply the tone of it. Lesami wasn't certain what language that was, but..._

 _The sound of a child shouting for their mother was rather universal._

" _Ne buika 's usenye!"_

 _Part of her wanted to cry, tight enough she could barely breathe, but what was she supposed to do, she couldn't just..._

 _It was harder than it should be, her legs weak and shaky, sore from sitting on the hard ground too long, but Lesami pushed herself up to her feet. She stood for a moment with a hand against the rough stone of the wall, breathing, gathering herself, staring at that spot on the ground, featureless in the darkness, no different than any other, where she'd almost—_

" _Buika!"_

 _She pushed herself forward, stumbling the first few steps, following the voice echoing around her, the thread connecting her to it lighting the way. As black as her surroundings were, she hardly seemed to notice, the path she had to take was blinding clear._

" _Ru ne susul."_

" _Ad'ika dikutla, gar kyramuche."_

" _A nu."_

" _Sasha..."_

 _Eventually, she didn't know how long she was walking, she came around a corner, and—_

Purple _._

 _She knew it was herself, somehow, that she was looking at herself. She couldn't say how, it was too dark to really see, she was moving too fast, she just knew. She'd come around the corner to appear somewhere else, a forest it looked like, dark and murky, and she was fighting, so_ fast _, darting around almost faster than she could follow, lightsabers swirling beacons in the dark, purple and blue clashing against a bloody red..._

 _(Which was a Sith thing, she knew, but the Sith were_ supposed _to be gone...)_

 _And she had a blue one, yes, she could have gotten that from anywhere, but_ purple _..._

 _She was remembering something, something she'd read once, about biochemistry and the genetic engineering of microbes to create physical materials — plastics, usually, but an Alderaanian firm a long time ago had discovered a way to..._

 _Ilusite could be synthesised._

 _Which everybody knew, of course — that was where the famous Sith red came from, the impurities particular to an industrial synthetic process. But, this biological one she was remembering just now, it was different. The Jedi didn't approve of the method, they preferred their spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, but..._

 _She was doing the math in her head right now, so she could be wrong, but she was pretty sure the impurities from this biological synthesis of ilusite would result in a purple lightsaber blade._

 _She didn't need a crystal meant for her._

 _She could_ make her own _._

 _She didn't need to—_

 _The vision dissolving around her, the headache and nausea that always came with such things lifting away, Lesami wiped at her face, smearing sweat and tears and snot across her glove._

 _Fuck the Masters. She hadn't asked to be the way she was, she didn't want any of this, but she didn't need their... She didn't need_ any _of them. She didn't like the Masters either, why should she expect them to like her back? And the other Jedi kids, just, fuck them all, she wasn't going to do things their way, she_ couldn't _do things their way._

 _She'd just make her own._

 _Her family might not have wanted her, the Jedi might not want her, but that, that was just too bloody bad, wasn't it? Because she, she didn't... Nobody_ asked _her to..._

 _She didn't need their fucking permission._

 _Ah, she didn't even know what she was talking about anymore. (And it was starting to feel scary again, she was so_ tired _, and she'd almost_ stopped _...) She should just...get out of here. Yes._

 _She had work to do._

* * *

Standing before the assembled Council of the Dantooine Enclave once again, Cina tapped the activation stud, the internal mechanisms of her new lightsaber flaring so brightly in the Force she could taste it, the brilliant blade a sharp, vibrant violet snapping into existence.

The reaction from the Council from something so simple was rather baffling.

It was part of their whole...graduation, basically, she had to construct her own lightsaber and present it to the Council. As volatile as the technology could be if one wasn't careful, it wasn't particularly _complicated_ , she couldn't imagine any of them had expected her to fail. (Especially since she _had_ done this before, at least once.) True, they'd probably expected a green, blue, or yellow blade, emitted by one of the crystals Lestin had offered her. But, well, none of them had quite... They just hadn't felt right.

So, Cina had made her own. It wasn't complicated — she'd placed an order for a sizeable specimen of a certain engineered bacteria from the University campus at Generis, the longest part had been waiting for the damn thing to come in. She'd accelerated the process of growing the crystal by...not _meditating_ , exactly. The meditating Jedi normally did was a broadening of focus, opening themselves up to everything all at once — which doubled as a great way to give herself a migraine — but this had been more a narrowing of focus, all of her awareness down to that little tank, the microscopic organisms wafting within. She'd allowed power from the Force to flow through herself and into them, accelerating all the various biological processes far beyond what anything could sustain naturally, guiding them into particular arrangements, a prism slowly growing at the centre as they gradually converted sugars and phosphates and trace metals into crystal.

When it was finished, all told developing over roughly two days, the resulting crystal was flawless, edges flat and smooth and perfectly symmetrical, a cloudy greyish-white to the naked eye. She hadn't needed to cut it or polish it or anything, it'd come out ready. Putting together the hilt, with all the finicky electronics involved, was tedious as all hell, but not truly difficult, certainly a far more mundane, technical process.

The point was, she didn't see that this was anything to be getting at all worked up over. Though, _worked up_ probably wasn't quite the way to say it — Jedi Masters such as they couldn't possibly allow themselves such indignity. But they were definitely reacting _somehow_ , a peculiar sharpness entering the air, something hard and wary and...not _quite_ fearful, but neither anything entirely removed from it. While Tokare and Dorak at least managed to keep their reaction from their faces, the latter only showing a hint of exasperation, Lamar was plain _glaring_ at the gentle purple light, seeming somehow personally offended by its existence.

(Though, honestly, Lamar often seemed personally offended by her existence, this wasn't news.)

Lestin, on the other hand, was smiling at her. Not an uncomplicated smile, amused and nostalgic and...rueful leaning into bitter, almost. Which was odd, but not exactly a new reaction either. (The Masters always had peculiar reactions to reminders of her old self, but Lestin's were the most confusing.) Taking another step toward her, he held out a hand. "May I?"

The blade winked out, and Cina flipped the hilt around in her hand, held it out for him to take. He did — gently, with both hands, a sense of humble reverence about the motion that reminded Cina of Bastila, storming Kang's estate back on Taris — turning it over in his hands a moment, looking at it from one angle then another, not just with his eyes but with the Force as well, slight pricks and sparks twitching in the air. "It's decent work. Longer than normal, though," he said, pale violet eyes flicking up to meet hers.

She shrugged. "I thought it'd be more comfortable that way." It hadn't taken her long to figure out she'd guessed right — the few times she'd played around with it so far, she needn't be _quite_ so careful with the placement of her fingers whenever she shifted her grip a little, the extra couple decimetres giving her plenty of room to work with. She hadn't actually used it much yet, but, well, she'd burned her own fingers on the practice sabers more than once, she _certainly_ didn't want to repeat that mistake with a real one.

"Mm, I suppose that might be so." Lestin flicked the blade on; in the moment it activated, Cina could feel electricity rush into the crystal, like a drink of cool water on a hot day. This was one of those consequences of creating it as she had — it was bound to her far more closely than a natural crystal would be, carrying an echo of herself inscribed into its very core. Which had interesting implications, there were probably all kinds of sorcery that could exploit that, but she hadn't had the opportunity to experiment yet. Regardless, she _did_ know, intuitively, that she could prevent the lightsaber from functioning, if she wanted to, quench it with a single thought. It would only work for someone else by her leave.

Of course, she did nothing to stop it, there wasn't even the slightest delay. But by the glance Lestin shot her, he knew it as well as she did, another peculiar smile twitching at his lips.

Another moment fiddling around, and he switched it off again, flipping it around in his hand to offer it back to her. She didn't bother with the...overly-humble thing she'd seen Bastila and Lestin do now — besides, she was pretty sure that was only to be done while handling someone else's lightsaber. As she clipped it back to her belt, Lestin said, "Your work is more than passable. I suspect it should hold together for years to come. If I may ask, where did you get the crystal?"

Cina shrugged. "I made it. _Chunisia rhotensis_ , used guided meditation to direct the formation of the crystal. It's not complicated."

"And you are aware," Lamar grumbled, a scowl forcing his face even harsher and craggier than usual, "that the Council on Coruscant takes a dim view on the use of synthesized lightsaber crystals. Their creation has been anathema for millennia now, in fact."

"No, the _industrial_ synthesis of lightsaber crystals is anathema. This was a biological process which, while perhaps something of a grey area, has not itself been banned."

"Some would argue such direct exploitation of living things is _worse_ than the industrial method."

Cina shot Lamar a doubtful look. "Gonna have to disagree with you there. If I were somehow forcing _beings_ to make things for me, sure, but they're bloody _bacteria_. That's hardly on the same moral level. Besides, considering how much energy I put into the whole thing, they got just as much out of it as I did. I really don't see what the problem is." She suspected that was a significant aspect of the problem the Council had with her, that she just didn't understand their objections to her behaviour much of the time, but there wasn't a whole lot she could do about that.

"Besides," she said, a teasing smirk pulling at her lips, "I like purple. It's pretty."

The Council seemed even _more_ annoyed with that than the actual synthetic crystal thing. Tee hee.

After a tedious lecture that went on _much_ too long — sometimes she had to wonder whether prodding at them was really worth it — they finally got to the bloody point. Though, Lamar might have kept berating her if Tokare didn't cut him off, sounding peculiarly exasperated for a Master. (Apparently he was getting just as fed up with Lamar's animosity as she was.) "We have one final trial for you, Apprentice, before your training is complete."

Cina waited for Tokare to go on but, of course, he didn't, the eyes of the Masters heavy but blank, unblinking. Holding in a sigh, she said, "I'm listening, Master."

"One of the Masters of this Enclave, a respected elder Jedi, was nearly killed during a training exercise with her padawan."

Once again, they paused, inexplicably waiting for a response. "Okay? I hope you're not expecting me to heal her, you have Jedi available who are far better at that than I am."

"No, that is not our task for you. In the aftermath, the child fled the Enclave, disappearing into the uninhabited wilderness." The rolling steppes of Dantooine were hardly _uninhabited_ , but she guessed they weren't counting the Dantari. "We have had no contact with her since, but local hunters report signs she is holed up in an old grove along a river some kilometres east of the city."

Cina had to bite the inside her lip to stop herself from smiling at Tokare's characterisation of this tiny little frontier settlement as a _city_. "Right, so...you want me to drag her back here, is that it?" She somehow doubted bloody Jedi Masters were asking her to kill the poor kid for them, she couldn't figure what else they wanted.

There were a few less-than-pleased looks at her wording, but Lestin was faintly smiling again. "We are leaving what is to be done with this wayward apprentice in your hands."

...Was _this_ their silly little test? Shoving her at a semi-acceptable target, seeing what she did with it? She wasn't sure whether she should be insulted or not. She meant, did they _really_ think she would just... Okay, whoever this was had managed to get the drop on her master, and might be comparatively dangerous, and might not react well to Cina showing up and trying to bring her back — she _might_ give Cina an easy enough excuse to off her and claim it was self defence.

But did they _really_ think Cina would, just, kill some kid, if she thought she could get away with it? That was just...

(Just how awful had she been, when she'd been a Sith?)

Okay, no, she _should_ be offended, but showing it would be counterproductive, so.

"Right, where exactly is this grove, then?"

* * *

"Hey, _ad'ika_ , you busy?"

Mission glanced up from her datapad, scowled at Canderous, looming over her looking very...Mandalorian. Not as much of a scowl as she'd usually try for, someone calling her that, but couldn't help that — Canderous was _way_ more intimidating than that assface Onasi. "You know Cina has been teaching me Mandalorian, I know what that means now." She didn't have a _whole_ lot of time to practice, Cina was very busy with Jedi stuff all the time, but she was picking it up faster than Sasha was learning Basic. But she was already, like...whatever the word like bilingual would be, but for five, so, she had more experience with the learning new languages thing.

"Gonna do something about it?" he asked, his scarred, too-blocky face pulling into a crooked, teasing smirk.

She felt her lips quirk into a pout — entirely without her input, she hadn't meant to do that.

He just grinned at her. Patronizing bastard. "Come on, we're going for a ride."

"A ride?"

"Sure. I'm sick of being cooped up on this damn ship, I figured we'd go out for a bit."

"Well..." That wouldn't be a _horrible_ thing, she guessed. She knew a lot of people thought the places she and Zee decided to live were pretty...claustrophobic, but they never stayed in one spot for very long, they moved along as they felt like. Really, their 'home' had been dotted across thirty levels over six city blocks — _Taris_ city blocks, which were _huge_. The _Ebon Hawk_ , as nice as it was, really was cramped by comparison. "Okay, I guess. Just lemme ask Zee if he wants to come."

"Already did. There's some work he wants to do on the interchange before Cina's done here. He said you should go without him."

That wasn't impossible — Zee had been tinkering with the ship's systems practically since they'd set foot on the thing, and Cina supposedly was going to be done with this Jedi training stuff soon. (Which was weird, Mission had gotten the impression it was supposed to take way longer than this, but it was _Cina_ , she guessed, she was awesome at pretty much everything.) "Well...okay, I guess. Just give me a minute."

Canderous hadn't said where they were going or what they were doing, so Mission really had no idea what she should be bringing with. But then, she hadn't asked either, couldn't really blame him for that. She patted herself, making sure had her 'pad and her projector and her com and her splits on her — not that she figured she could possibly need them, this planet was in the karking stone age. She ran about the ship for a little bit, cramming protein bars and water bottles in a bag, stopped by the tiny little medbay to grab a kit. Plus a few Twi'lek-friendly anti-allergen shots while she was at it, the kit had probably been stocked with humans in mind. She wasn't actually allergic to anything, not that she knew of, but who knew what might be on a foreign frontier planet. Better overprepared than dead.

She dropped in on Zee quick, to make sure Canderous actually _had_ asked him if he wanted to come. Zee told her to go ahead without him, but to make sure she had her blaster on her, and to not wander too far from Canderous. There were local predators, apparently.

Mission rolled her eyes at his mothering, but didn't say anything.

When she stepped off the ship — the odd, sweet, tingly wind of the planet tickling distractingly at her lekku — she was somewhat surprised to see _two_ speeder bikes sitting out waiting. She'd known Canderous had found one in storage on the ship... Had he gone out and bought another one? Probably not a _bad_ idea, they had too many people on the ship for one speeder to be enough. Canderous was leaning against the saddle of one, muttering something to Sasha, who was perched on the other one.

The little orphan girl was sitting like a damn bird or something, her feet on the seat and squatting down, her legs folded up. That wasn't so weird, she never used furniture the way it was meant to be. What was rather more unnerving was the blaster she was holding, the thing awkwardly large in her tiny hands, turning it around and poking at it, occasionally asking Canderous something — Mission knew they were questions, but her Mandalorian was still a little too sketch to pick up exactly what.

Part of her wanted to run up and snatch the blaster out of Sasha's hands — she was a _tiny_ little kid, she shouldn't be playing with those — but she'd hardly gotten two steps before she hesitated. She was a tiny little kid, but she was a Mandalorian tiny little kid. Canderous was...sort of responsible, she guessed, he probably knew what he was doing.

She noticed as she got closer the battery pack was missing. Canderous must have made sure the blaster was harmless before handing it over. Right. Never mind.

"Hello, Sasha." Mission forced her lips into a smirk, leaning against the bike. "Playing with blasters now? Aren't you scary enough already?"

That had been in Mandalorian, and it'd seemed _mostly_ right to her, but by the confusion on Sasha's face she must have messed something up. "Oh, scary, okay. I'm not playing, I'm learning. Playing with weapons is bad."

Well, at least she was getting that much. Mission had thought before, maybe Cina and Canderous weren't the _best_ people to be looking after little kids. Don't get her wrong, they were great, but they were both rather... "Violent" wasn't quite the word she was looking for, but she was having trouble thinking of a better one. They were both quite scary people when she thought about it, they were just also capable of being nice — which wasn't a new concept, really, a lot of the Beks were like that too. But _they_ shouldn't really be taking care of kids either.

Mission forcibly stopped herself from dwelling on the fact that they were all probably dead now.

"I'm assuming you know how to ride."

Resisting the urge to bite Canderous's head off, Mission said, "Yeah, sure. Best way to get around on Taris." She'd actually _almost_ volunteered to enter that swoop race for Cina, but had decided against it before she could say something stupid — she _was_ a damn good pilot, if she said so herself, but those underground races were just _brutal_. Probably would have gotten herself killed. Besides, she might be good, but that Bothan lady was something else.

Canderous nodded, casually accepting her claim that she knew what she was doing. As weird and scary as Canderous could be at times, at least he didn't treat her like a little kid. (Though he did usually call her one in Mandalorian, still.) "Let's get gone, then." Switching to Mandalorian, "Sasha, you ride with _kebin'ika_."

Mission huffed at the nickname — she hadn't known what it meant when Cina had started calling her that, so she hadn't protested at first. Of course, now that she knew it meant "little blue" it was kind of annoying, but Canderous and even Sasha had picked it up before she realized that, it was sort of too late to do anything about it now. She meant, it wasn't _that_ bad, people have called her way worse things than that before, so it also just wasn't worth it to kick up a fuss about it. It was still a little irritating anyway.

Though, when she thought about it, why was _Cina_ coming up with random Mandalorian nicknames for people now? She meant, she knew now Cina wasn't _really_ some brainiac from Alderaan — that had been sort of sketch to begin with, she'd never met one but she was pretty sure fancy-pants professors at rich people schools didn't learn to fight like that — but it wasn't like she was Mandalorian either. Cina didn't know who she'd been before the Jedi had messed with her head (which was fucking _scary_ ), but she'd said she thought she was from the Core somewhere, Alsakan or Shawken or Denon or whatever, one of those super-old super-rich Republic worlds. Definitely not Mandalorian.

Just because of Sasha and Canderous, maybe? But that didn't seem quite right, when she'd first come up with the _kebin'ika_ thing she'd just been whipping it out, probably hadn't had time to stop and think about all that. And she _did_ seem to know way more about Mandalorians than anyone but other Mandalorians did — not just the language but, like, cultural stuff too. Enough that, no matter how many times she insisted she wasn't Mandalorian, Mission knew Canderous was still convinced she was.

She'd apparently been in the war, so...maybe she'd just studied the Mandalorians a lot while fighting them? That was possible, Mission guessed, it just still seemed like a lot...

But anyway, that wasn't really important right now.

Quick making sure everything attached to the speeder she'd be using was strapped down well enough — and scowling when she noticed a familiar long metal case fixed to the frame, apparently Canderous had packed her rifle — she hopped on, firing the thing up, the repulsors sending little vibrations rattling through her head to toe. (They were small enough it wasn't painful or anything, just impossible to not notice.) A brief moment later, she felt Sasha slip into the saddle behind her, though as far away as possible, they weren't actually touching at all.

Mision rolled her eyes — this kid sometimes, honestly. After a bit of fumbling around, she managed to catch both of Sasha's wrists, gently pulled her forward a little bit, dragging her hands to sit low around her waist. She didn't actually know how to say _hold on_ in Mandalorian, scrambled a moment to find something she _could_ say that would work. "Don't fall." There, that should do.

There was a moment of tense silence, but Sasha eventually let out a little grumble, slid a bit closer, leaned against her back. Just a little, light enough Mission barely noticed, but she _was_ leaning forward enough she wouldn't just fly off the back...hopefully. "Yes, I know. Sorry."

"It's okay." She did think she got _why_ the kid was so...shy. Well, Mission didn't know the _details_ , but she could guess the general idea well enough. She'd met a _lot_ of fucked up kids back home. It was a bit exasperating, sometimes, getting Sasha to do anything — or just not lurk silent and invisible — but she _did_ get it, so she tried to not be mean about it.

Anyway, when they got to the edge of the primitive spaceport, she and Canderous kicking their speeders up to a less boring speed in the blink of an eye, the bike lurching under her and the wind clawing at her face, Sasha's arms clenched around her, a high squeal followed by ecstatic giggling muffled against Mission's back, her shyness apparently forgotten.

Mission felt a smile twitching at her lips.

፠

When Canderous said they were going for a "ride", he'd apparently meant they were going to camp out in the middle of nowhere. Which...okay, fine? Mission didn't think she'd ever slept outside before, but there also hadn't really _been_ an outside on Taris — she'd lived far enough down that even the concourses had been enclosed, the who knew how many levels above their heads blocking off the sun, the air stale and still and filled with industrial fumes and decay and who knew what else.

Sleeping out on the concourse was also a damn good way to get yourself murdered or raped or something, so obviously she hadn't done that either. Still, no "outside" around, not really.

And she supposed it was nice enough out here. She didn't think she'd ever seen so many plants before, grass almost up to her shoulders stretching out as far as she could see, rolling over little hills, gently waving in the breeze. And there _was_ a breeze, which was slightly odd. Mission hadn't been anywhere that had had _wind_ before — except on a speeder, obviously, that didn't count — she hadn't realized air could move around so much. It was distracting, constantly tickling at her lekku, the grasses hissing against each other, she couldn't not notice it.

Canderous found a spot on a hill topped by a handful of trees, the grasses pushed back enough there was some mostly empty ground. He unloaded a few bags from their speeders, and also Sasha, pointing at the bags while muttering at the girl. (Mission wasn't good enough with Mandalorian yet, she couldn't pick out the words over the constant low noise of the wind.) And then he was leading her off again, zipping down the hill, leaving Sasha behind them.

It took a little bit for Mission to shove off her nervousness about that. Sasha could take care of herself — shit, if someone else showed up they'd probably never even know she was there. It was fine.

Canderous led her over the peak of one hill, rocketing down the trough after it, the wind yanking at her lekku just this side of painfully, up another, down again, before slowing a bit going up the next, shortly drifting to a silent halt, half-hidden in the grass. He hopped off, nodding down to the ground next to him.

Baffled, she jumped down next to him. And nearly fell over — she couldn't see the ground through the grass, it was rather lower down than she'd thought. She tried to ignore the grass scratching at her arms and her lekku, turned back to Canderous, trying to act cool, like she hadn't just almost crashed to the ground like an idiot. "Okay, what are we doing out here?"

"Get your rifle out."

Mission pouted at him for a second but, with a sigh, obeyed. She snapped the case out of its spot fixed to the side of her speeder, laid it over the saddle. (Setting it down on the ground would probably be impossible.) While clicking the pieces back together, she glared over at Canderous. "What am I supposed to be shooting?" She could hear the unease on her own voice.

If anyone would have asked before Cina had come sashaying into her life, and everything had quickly become very dramatic and confusing, Mission would have said she was such a total badass, you have no idea how awesome she is. Maybe the Beks had been something of a bad influence, boasting and swaggering around like too many people she'd known growing up, but it wasn't _just_ boasting, really. She'd done some pretty awesome slicing over the years, if she did say so herself, she and Zee had helped in several runs up to the surface, breaking into rich people shops and homes and making away with the valuables, a few times even raids against other gangs. She always stayed toward the back, of course — her job was to deal with security, slicing into computer systems and cracking locks and safes, she never usually did any of the fighting — but she _had_ killed people before. Mostly in self-defense, true, but that was just a part of life in the lower city.

Zee had always been more of a fighter than her, but that didn't make her _less_ of a badass. If anything, it made her _more_ one — the two of them were a team, their own forms of awesome being awesome together made them both more awesome, it was the way they worked. And he didn't just hard carry her either, _she'd_ saved _his_ life a few times too. (Big furry idiot had a bad habit of not watching his back, most of the times she'd shot anyone had been picking off people trying to hurt Zee.) And Cina and Canderous and Asyr, and even the grumpy old asshole and the stuck-up Jedi, they were all completely awesome in their own ways, but they couldn't beat her at hers. Mission knew they would never have gotten off Taris alive without her, they would never have found Bastila in the first place (ungrateful bitch), Cina and Canderous had both said as much to her face. Cina gratefully, and slightly guiltily, but Canderous as though he were just stating a simple fact. Because she was a badass, they knew it too.

But she hated this fracking rifle.

She couldn't even say why, exactly. She was _much_ better with it than she was a normal blaster, that was true — her aim with a pistol had always been kinda shit, but carefully holding the thing and with something to prop it up against she was a far steadier shot. And the scope helped too, obviously. And she always got too shaky to be very useful, all the noise of blasterfire, flashes of painful burning death going all over the place, with a little bit of distance she could keep her head.

She didn't know how many people she'd killed, during their rescue mission. She hadn't counted. She'd watched Cina and Zee, picked off anyone who was paying too much attention to them, flicking by one after another with very little thought. It had been easy. And there was nothing they could do about it, they didn't know she was there. And they probably never had either — from the angle she'd been shooting at, it'd been easiest to hit their heads, they'd probably all been dead before they realized they'd been hit.

She _should_ feel like a bit of a badass, covering everyone like that. She'd saved Cina's and Zee's and Onasi's ass more than once. They probably wouldn't have made it out without her, she should be glad she could help.

But, she didn't. She couldn't say exactly why. It just felt kind of...skeezy? She didn't know.

But she did know she hated this damn rifle.

Mission was somewhat relieved Canderous didn't want her to shoot people. (Which, it would be kinda weird if he did, who else would be out here?) Plodding slowly along a stream at the base of the next hill over were...some kind of animal, she guessed. They were sort of creepy-looking things. Taking them in through the scope, they were four-legged, their limbs thin and spindly, their hairless skin almost gleaming in the sunlight, green speckled with orange, would probably fade into the grasses... _somewhat_ okay, if they weren't standing out in the open. They had these big thick horns sticking out of the back of their heads, and their feet did look to be clawed, but they were kinda...harmless-looking? She meant, they moved all slow and gentle, nibbling at the grass along the stream, obviously some kind of herd herbivore. The horns and the claws were probably just to defend themselves from kath hounds, she guessed.

Staring at the things, Mission got a rather odd feeling. She just... She didn't think she'd ever actually seen real animals before. Bugs, and the little lizard things that got all over the place in the lower city, but... It was weird.

And she didn't see them for very long. The second she fired — the shot took one in the eye, lancing through its skull, it died instantly — the rest fled, bounding away over the hills with surprising speed, a few blinks and they were all gone.

Canderous said something about that being a nice shot or whatever (which, nice of him, she guessed, fine, but it wasn't like it was _hard_ ), said to pack up again. She pouted at him for a second, but he was already zipping off. By the time she had the rifle put away, ready to get going again, he was back, the creepy-looking thingy she'd shot slumped over the back of his speeder. It looked rather larger than it had through the scope, bigger than she was, the horns were as thick as her arm.

Belatedly, Mission realized they were going to be eating the thing. That...seemed obvious now, people did do that sort of thing, she'd just...

Well, Mission wasn't certain she'd ever eaten anything protein-based that _wasn't_ reprocessed who even knew how many times. Honestly, she hadn't even known these things were supposed to be imitating animal parts until she'd been...probably ten or so. It was still a surreal thought, looking at the creepy animal-thing and thinking Canderous was going to make food out of it. It didn't look like food, it looked like...

She didn't know what the fuck it looked like, honestly. Animals were kinda weird-looking in person.

But anyway, creepy animal-thing successfully killed, Canderous led her back to the hill they'd left Sasha and their junk at, floating off rather slower this time, trying to keep the thing balanced on his speeder. When they did get back, he kinda drifted a little before coming to a sudden halt, the thing just flopping right off onto the dirt. Easier than shoving it off, she guessed.

Apparently, Sasha had been busy while they were gone — she'd already gotten a tent up, a couple bits of equipment scattered about, crouching over some boxy metal thing, no idea what that was. "How does this _shikasii'm_ go?" Mandalorian again, one word in there Mission didn't catch, but it was probably a swear of some kind. She'd gotten the feeling by now Sasha had a filthy mouth for a little kid.

Though maybe Canderous was just that bad of an influence, come to think of it.

Not that Mission had absolutely any right at all to judge. She'd be lying if she said she hadn't gone out of her way to teach Sasha as many bad words in Basic (or Huttese or whatever) as she could figure out how to explain what they meant. It was almost funnier if she couldn't explain, Sasha throwing out swears randomly was both hilarious and just fracking cute.

After Canderous showed Sasha how to get the grill working — at least...Mission thought that's what the word in Basic was? They were still talking Mando... — he set into tearing the creepy animal-thing apart with a big scary knife, which was really just _very_ gross, Mission firmly put her back to the whole thing, sitting talking to Sasha instead. (Though she could still hear the hacking and squicking noises it was making, _yech_.) Their awkward conversation, in a stilted mix of Basic and Mandalorian was mostly about how completely awesome chocolate was. Which, Mission was with Sasha on that one a hundred percent — she'd never had the stuff before stealing the _Hawk_ , but apparently Kang liked a drink made with the stuff, there was a whole bunch of it, she and Sasha had been steadily drinking their way through his supply. She'd brought some with, actually, she had a little pot of it over the grill warming up.

Which, warm drink, not a bad idea, it was sort of chilly with the wind, Mission was used to it being much wetter and warmer. She kinda hoped they weren't actually spending the night out here, it would probably get really cold when the sun went down...

Apparently, Sasha had been having chocolate a lot longer than Mission had, it was one of the things she'd stolen whenever she could get her hands on it while living hidden on the ship. (It was kinda depressing, Sasha's life, Mission avoided thinking about it.) She couldn't get at it in drink form, obviously, but she'd sneak the bars of the stuff, whenever she could. Which, Mission didn't entirely get that — she'd tried it in candy form, and it got smeared all over her teeth, and it took forever to get it out of her mouth, she wasn't a fan. Tasted _awesome_ , of course, but too sticky. But the drink form was great, she could sip at this stuff constantly for the rest of her life and she'd be cool with that.

Eventually, Canderous took over the grill thingy, which was fine, they'd already finished their stuff off by then. He quickly had this whole complicated process going, water boiling in a rather bigger pot, strips of bloody meat sizzling alongside unfamiliar plant bits he'd pulled out of a bag, peeled and sliced with smooth quickness that said he'd done this a billion times before. And eventually everything was getting cut up into smaller pieces and thrown into the pot, and those were probably spices of some kind, the steam was getting all flavorful and almost stinging at her eyes a little bit, had to be getting close to finished at this point.

Turned out Canderous could cook, apparently. Like, real cooking, with bits pulled from plants and animals and stuff, not just preparing reprocessed junk. Which, hadn't seen that coming, but okay.

She still thought the idea of eating plant and animal parts was just fracking _weird_.

፠

Mission was totally right: it was damn _cold_ out here.

Apparently they were staying out here, not going back to the ship. They'd just sat out talking a long while, about whatever came to mind, indirectly helping Mission out with her Mandalorian and Sasha with her Basic. As the sun started getting down to the horizon, it got _really_ windy, but Canderous had planned for that, because Mandos planned for everything — he must have known what direction the wind would be coming from, because the trees blocked the worst of it, creaking and hissing like crazy, they had to nearly shout to be heard over it. Most of the wind went around them, yeah, but it was still enough it was _cold_ , Canderous had cranked up the grill thingy a bit, flames dancing under the little bars. (She wondered how much power that thing carried, certainly it couldn't do that very long.) Sasha had also made hot chocolate again, because of course she did.

Though, the little girl had conked out a little while ago now, curled up on the ground a little bit away from the grill, her short yellow hair fluttering in the wind and that knife she always carried everywhere glinting in the firelight. When she'd fallen asleep, Canderous had let out a low guffaw, said something about why the hell had she put the tent up in the first place. He hadn't moved her, though, just tucked one of the blankets around her and left her there.

Watching him, Mission wondered if he had kids out there somewhere. As odd as it might seem, being the hard Mando badass and all, he did kinda seem the type. And he was sure old enough, he looked like he could be _Cina's_ dad. But she didn't actually ask. Wasn't really her business.

(Besides, if he did, but he was out here with them instead, it was probably a sad story, and she wasn't in the mood for that.)

As night got thicker and thicker around them, Mission poked at her datapad, continuing her research into places to go. She and Zee had always been planning on leaving Taris, moving out to live somewhere else, they'd always looked into places off and on, trying to find a nice backwater world they could go disappear on. Though...maybe not quite as primitive as they'd been thinking, at first. Mission hadn't realized until coming out here, but there was something about...

She was used to being surrounded by huge kriffing buildings all the time, okay. It wasn't so bad she couldn't ignore it, most of the time, but there was something about sitting out here that was just... It was just _big_ , okay, the open fields all around her, the sky fucking _everywhere_ , it was just _big_ , who knew the sky was so damn _big_ , it was unsettling.

She knew Zee preferred more undeveloped worlds, more like his homeworld, but there had to be ones that still had nature-y stuff but wasn't just so... _big_? Like, they could have both his kind of thing but cities and stuff too, right? That didn't seem like too much to ask...

It hadn't ever quite felt real, the idea of running away. It was something they wanted to do obviously, for pretty much forever, they'd been (stealing and) saving up money to do it for ages now. Now that they were actually off Taris it just felt...closer. More real, like. They could go right now, if they wanted, just walk off and take a shuttle and go wherever they liked.

The thought was kind of scary, but...it was just kind of great, too. Life had suddenly gotten way more open and interesting in the last couple months, no doubt.

Not that she had any idea where they would go. The problem with the galaxy is there was just so damn much of it, she didn't know enough, and with the war going on and everything it was complicated and...

And she wasn't really sure she _wanted_ to go.

But she also kind of doubted she'd be allowed to stay. She knew Cina had her own stuff, she'd be off doing Jedi things every day now, and Mission didn't know if she was allowed to go with. She did kind of want to stick around, because Cina was _awesome_ , and interesting stuff would definitely be going on around her, and Mission could help, because she was a badass too, okay, but...

It wasn't really her business. Cina (or Canderous) would probably tell her and Zee to leave eventually, or the Jedi would make Cina get rid of them, she didn't know. And they had to have somewhere to go in mind for when that happened.

Because it wasn't like they could go home anymore. Taris had never really been _home_ home in the first place, but there was nowhere to back to, it was all gone.

(She preferred to avoid thinking about that.)

Mission pulled the jacket Canderous had thrown over her tighter, trying to stop the shivering. Because it was cold, for sure, stupid nature.

"You good over there, _kebin'ika_?"

She shot a narrow glare over the grill. Canderous had taken one of the horns off the thing, was scraping at it with a knife. Apparently meant to carve something out of it, which...okay? "I'd worry about yourself, more. I hear people get cold easier in their old age."

Canderous just chuckled a little, seemingly unbothered by the taunt (as he always was). "What are you working on over there? Slicing into the Jedi network? I bet they have all kinds of secrets hiding away in there."

Oh, she was sure they did — they just also had _seriously_ good security. She'd poked at it a little bit, and...well, she probably _could_ break it if she wanted to, she just doubted it'd be worth it. It was just their library in there, she thought, and that was probably all just...boring Jedi rambling boringly about boring Jedi stuff. Hard pass. "Nothing, really."

"Mm." Somehow, Canderous managed to make just a grunt sound very, very dubious.

She scowled. "It's not your business, old man."

"I'm just making conversation." He stopped hacking at whatever he was making for a moment, turning it in his hand, before going back at it again from a different angle. "We are going to be holed up together for a while, you know. Things will go more smoothly if we all know each other a little better."

"What are you talking about?"

"Cina has suggested the Jedi are likely to have some project or another for her once she's done here. It's a very long, complicated story, and much of it went right over my head, but I did get that much. Small teams like ours operate much more effectively if we have a clear understanding of each other's skills, interests, personal hang-ups, all of it." Canderous paused his carving again, shot her a level look across the grill. "You might think you're hiding it, but something is bothering you. You're part of my crew now, so it is part of my business."

"It's not your ship, _shkrelask_." Mission didn't even know what language that was in — Nikto, maybe? — she'd only ever heard it used as an insult.

Canderous gave her a flat, exasperated glare. "I meant in the sense that I'm _in_ it, not that it's _mine_. Basic doesn't have a good word for that. Like _ner_ against _nisa_." That was obviously Mando he was talking about, but Mission didn't know enough to get the point he was making. Well, no, okay, the point was sort of obvious in context — _my_ versus, what, _with me_ or something — it was just new information.

"It doesn't matter. Me and Zee aren't going to be around that long anyway."

"Oh? I got the feeling you were planning on sticking around. The _Hawk_ being more yours than mine, and all that."

Despite herself, she couldn't help smirking a little at that — she still thought that was great, she loved Cina sometimes. "Well, yeah, but I didn't... Cina might have some super special mission or whatever coming up, and she's paying you, so you'll be staying, but...it sort of doesn't have anything to do with us, does it? I kinda assumed Cina would be dropping us off somewhere."

Canderous _almost_ smiled, looking somewhere between annoyed and amused. "I don't know about that, _kebin'ika_. I think Cina means to keep you two around."

"Why?" She meant, she might be a badass, she'd say so to almost anyone, but they were all...well, _super_ badass. Cina was even getting ridiculous Jedi powers and shit now too. She was good at her own thing, yeah, but it wasn't... It was very situational, was what she guessed she meant. Unless whatever this thing Cina had to be doing involved slicing or data mining, chances were they didn't need her.

Or assassination, she guessed, but she kinda thought Jedi weren't cool with that. Not that she was, if they wanted her along to assassinate people she thought she'd rather be left behind.

(Even if she wouldn't know what to do with herself.)

Not to mention, she'd kind of always gotten the feeling Cina saw Mission as... Okay, she didn't _say_ it, not like that assface Onasi had, and she still treated Mission and Zee like anyone else, but she wasn't as good at hiding what she really thought as she thought she was. Cina really did think Mission was a little kid who had to protected from things. If Cina could afford to abandon Mission somewhere 'safe' and get on with her life, Mission wasn't sure she wouldn't.

Cina _liked_ her, of course, and she was nice about it, but she was still trying to be a responsible adult. She was just really, _really_ bad at it.

"Three reasons, I think. The first one, well..." Canderous smirked a little, the look almost scary, with all the scars, and the fire throwing shadows dark shadows across his face. "She does just like you. Thinks you're funny. If you're going to have people around, they might as well be entertaining people. Can't say I blame her."

Mission pouted a little — that wasn't a _bad_ reason to keep her around, the way he said it just made it sound like Cina thought she was an interesting pet, or something. Which, she _didn't_ , Canderous was just very blunt and very Mandalorian like that. "If she's being all serious Jedi and having a job to do and stuff, that's not really a very good reason."

"You'd be surprised. And then...let's get the one you're going to hate out of the way next: you and Zaalbar are alone."

"What?"

"Both of you lost your home and everyone you knew — in an incident her Republic friends are indirectly responsible for, that just makes it worse. Even if she did want to get rid of you, where is she supposed to put you? You have nowhere to go back to. She hasn't said as much in so many words, but I'm certain she feels responsible for you. Hell, I'd bet she'll drop by an Alderaanian consulate to officially claim custody of you, once we get off this little dustball."

That... _Seriously?_ "Oh, there's no way _that's_ happening!"

Canderous shrugged. "You might want to think about it. It would more or less make you an Alderaanian citizen, and there are benefits that come with that. But, suit yourself."

... That was _so_ not the point. He wasn't entirely wrong about that part, Mission knew that — hell, she wasn't a citizen of _anywhere_ right now, she didn't think she even legally existed, technically, and that came with all kinds of complications. (One example off the top of her head, she hadn't been able to get food and housing benefits from the government, back when she'd been younger and could have actually used it. Just stealing things was easier than someone who'd been born off the grid getting help.) If it were just that, that would be one thing, that would be _fine_ , but he was saying... It sounded like Cina wanted to, like, go out and make herself Mission's _mom_ or something. Legally speaking.

Mission didn't need that, okay. She could take care of herself. She always had, ever since her real mom had died and Griff had run off like a stupid _asshole_. She didn't need it.

"Told you you would hate it."

"Shut up."

Canderous just chuckled again.

"Don't give me that, you condescending old _sleemo_ , I don't need anybody looking after me."

"I didn't say you did. If nothing else, you've proven that very well."

Mission had had more of a rant to come after that, but Canderous, just, acknowledging her point before she could really get to it had her hanging for a second. "Uh... Well, yeah, but... Then, why do..."

Canderous snorted. "The thing about Cina is, as deadly a warrior and as practical a commander as she may be, she's also shockingly soft-hearted. She'll kill people without a blink if she feels she has to, or if she just thinks they need killing, by the most brutally effective way she can think of. She's damn good at it too. But she's more idealistic than it might seem at first glance. She's the sort of warrior who fights because she must, while at once looking forward to a world where she doesn't have to. What this means for you, she does know that you can take care of yourself, and that you always have. But she thinks you shouldn't have had to. And since, in her mind, adults take care of children, she'll do what she can for you and Zaalbar and Sasha here, simply because she can, and she wants to.

"It's not really even about you being young — I'm sure she'd do the same for anyone in her crew. Doing what she can just looks a little different when you're still a child under Republic law."

Well... Okay, Mission had sort of known that already. She wouldn't have put it the same way Canderous did — he was very Mandalorian, after all — but that was basically what she'd just thought to herself a minute ago. That Cina thought about her and Zee like they were just kids, but didn't act like it. Really, she was more surprised Canderous had noticed the same thing...and kinda seemed to agree. "How do you know that?"

"I pay attention, _ad'ika_. Cina's part of my crew too."

Which, that was fair. It was obvious by now that Canderous wasn't the stereotypical Mando, the empty-headed honor-crazy blood-thirsty idiot. She just kinda sorta forgot that sometimes. "Well, still, okay, she needed our help on Taris, but not really anymore. It just seems more likely she'd do the, you know, responsible adult thing, since she can now."

"Here you're assuming you two have the same definition of _responsible adult_." Canderous paused a moment, turning his carving around in his hand again. By this point, it was obvious he was making a little statue of the weird animal thing he'd took it off of, which was...strange, but Mandalorians were often sort of strange, whatever. "Notice I didn't object to you two sticking around."

That just meant Canderous was _also_ terrible at the responsible adult thing, probably even worse than Cina, but okay. "Yeah, why not though? I thought you'd be looking to get rid of us way more than Cina would."

He shrugged. "You're an important part of the team. That's the third reason. Even if I were the one in charge of this outfit, I wouldn't _get rid_ of you."

For a few long seconds, Mission could only blink at him like an idiot. "Huh?"

If anything, he just seemed to think that was funny, chuckling to himself like the condescending old geezer he was. "You did notice we would all be dead now if not for you? You found Shan for them. The way Cina tells it, she probably wouldn't have been able to fight herself off the platform without you laying covering fire. You got the recognition codes. You cracked the security on Davik's hangar, and on the ship itself. You were critical to that whole operation and everyone knows it."

"Yeah, well, you could find someone else for that. None of what I did was special, or anything."

"Wasn't it?"

"Anyone could have told them about Shan, Brejik announced he had her like a kriffing idiot."

Canderous shrugged again. "All right, I'll give you that one."

"And, anyone could have sliced the hangar door and—"

"I don't know about that. Davik was a paranoid bastard — he had his own team of programmers handling security, but you cut right through it like it was nothing. My original plan included a detour to pick up the passcodes for the ship, but when I saw how good you were I decided we didn't need them. If we had needed to make that detour, if our substitute slicer took even a minute longer on the door, we would have been too late, the ship would be gone already."

...Okay, she guessed that _might_ be fair. There _were_ other slicers who could have done it — she was a badass at this stuff, but she wasn't the _only_ person in the _whole fracking galaxy_ who could do what she could — but it was true Kang's security had been pretty good. Better than the planetary government's, actually. (Not better than the Sith military, though, that shit was _fun_ to play with.) There were other slicers she could use, that was sort of the point. "You can't give me all the credit for the recognition codes, if you hadn't just walked into the Sith base like a badass—"

"I just arranged a meeting with a contact. That's not exactly hard. I couldn't bribe enough to get those codes, and none of us could have skipped across my com to slice them out either."

"Using coms as a bridge is a pretty basic trick, really."

"Yes, but registering clean recognition codes with the Sith military database without anyone noticing isn't."

"Someone _did_ notice, they started firing on us before we got away—"

"Shan said Malak could feel them through that Jedi shit — we _did_ get out of atmo before they noticed, if the codes hadn't worked they would have blasted us before we got that high."

"All right, fine, but anyone else could have done the slicing work. I mean, I cracked Republic military encrypts when I was, like, eight, the Imperial ones aren't really that different."

Canderous smirked. "Did you mean to make my point for me? How many eight-year-old kids do you know who went playing around with military-grade security, _when they were_ _ **eight**_?"

"Including myself? Three."

"How many actually cracked it?"

... That was _so_ not the point. But, no matter how much that was _so_ not the point, Mission was having trouble finding something to say, just left glaring at him.

"Also, I notice you had nothing to say about covering us during the battle at the race."

Mission shuffled in place a little, trying to ignore her sudden discomfort. "There are plenty of snipers out there. Probably better than me, that's the first time I've done it."

He let out another low chuckle. "And you keep proving me point for me. From what the others have told me, you did a _fucking good job_ for your first go at it. Hell, Asyr was pretty sure you managed to nail that asshole doing strafing runs in that speeder — I did wonder why the thing suddenly crashed into the stands. That was you, right?"

"Well, yes." It had taken multiple tries, snapping off a shot whenever she saw him coming by again between covering Cina and Zee, but she had gotten him eventually. And sent the speeder careening into the crowd, probably killed, like, twenty people...

She thought she'd been hiding how skeezy she was feeling, but apparently not well enough — Canderous gave her an odd, narrow-eyed look, couldn't say what that was. "You okay over there, _kebin'ika_? You don't seem so pleased about your work."

"Well, it's just kinda... I don't know." It was hard to articulate what she meant, even to herself. "I mean, the rest of you, charging in like big fucking heroes, and I'm just...in the back, doing my sneaky thing. It just doesn't seem... I don't know. It's just kinda gross, isn't it?"

"Gross?"

"I don't know! The slicing and the stealing, that was always kinda sketch, you know, but I didn't think about it too hard, we did what we had to to survive, you know? But that damn rifle, I don't know, it just seems kinda skeezy. Those people I killed, they didn't even know I was there, I just... I don't know."

Canderous was staring at her, flat and hard, looking very intimidatingly Mandalorian. And she was certain he was about to say something _very_ Mandalorian, about warriors and honor and some such. Because he was Mandalorian, and that's what they did. And it probably wasn't gonna be very nice, because doing the slicer/sniper thing was...very non-Mandalorian, it was just kinda...sneaky and back-stabby and so not with their big noble warrior... _thing_. She wrapped the jacket tighter around her, settling in for the lecture.

She hadn't guessed entirely wrong, but she turned out to have it kind of backward.

With a casual air, as though changing the subject to something completely unrelated, Canderous said, "You know, we're not all warriors, we Mandoade. Any society needs more than just fighters to function. There's all sorts — craftsmen, merchants, servers, bureaucrats, teachers, artists, everything you have out here. In every group, no matter its size, everyone has a role they play. And, even among the warrior caste, people perform different roles. We're not all front-line soldiers, wars on an interstellar scale require far more than that. And, just as the Republic and the Empire do, we have spies and slicers and snipers and so forth, almost anything you have we have a version of.

"I think the problem you're having, _ad'ika_ ," he said, a smile twitching at his scarred and lined face, "is you feel you have done something dishonorable. You don't put it in those terms, most _aruetii_ don't, but that's what it is. Those people you killed, you didn't look them in the eye when you did it, they didn't have a chance to shoot back. You steal and you sneak around, not offering a straight fight. And you feel this is dishonorable.

"We Mandoade, we do not think so. We feel, what is right and what is not is often individual — to live with honor is to perform your role with skill and integrity. For direct warriors, like myself and Cina and your big friend, this means one thing. For people who do what you do, it means another. Back on Taris, you did exactly what was expected of you in battle without protest, but then did quite a bit more on top of that, providing creative solutions to problems the rest of us couldn't solve. That is your role, and you performed it admirably. There is no dishonor in that."

It took Mission a few seconds to find her voice again. She was just completely blindsided. Like, she'd expected Canderous would think she was...well, some dirty evil outsider, doing dirty evil outsider things. It hadn't occurred to her the kriffing Mandalorian would actually _approve_ of her sneaky skeevy shit. "Are you fucking with me right now?"

"No, of course not. You're a critical part of the team, _kebin'ika_ , and I'm sure Cina thinks the same. Hell..." He let out a low chuckle, shaking his head and smiling to himself. "...if you were Mandoade, raised in a warrior clan, I'm sure you'd be a young woman in quite good standing by now."

She scowled. "Then why do you keep calling me _ad'ika_ so much?"

"Because you're also tiny."

"Screw you, old man."

"Now, really, young lady, that's just indecent. I'm old enough to be your grandfather, you know."

A guffaw wrenched itself out of her throat before she could stop it. " _Eewww_ , dirty old geezer, in your dreams."

Canderous smirked at her for a moment. "Feeling better now?"

She tried to summon the feeling to glare at him, but it was hard, a traitorous smile pulling at her lips. Because, well, she _did_ feel a little better. Not _completely_ — the city getting levelled was still _really_ sad when she thought about it, and she still thought the sniping was, just, kinda not so good. It's not like _she_ was Mandalorian, she didn't really care about their ridiculous honor stuff. But she still...

It wasn't about that, really, when it came down to it. Either of them, even. It was sad all those people were dead, but...Taris had never been _home_ home. She'd liked some of the Beks, but...

It didn't really matter if the things she did were kinda gross. Because they _were_ kinda gross, but she still...

She'd never really had a, a team or a crew or whatever, like Canderous was talking about. She'd been...kinda sorta with the Beks, kinda. (It was complicated.) She had a few friends here and there, sure, and Zaerdra was a meddling old biddy, but she'd really only had Zee, it'd been the two of them versus the world, really. And she'd been okay with that. She didn't really need a family or a home or anything, Zee was all of both just fine. She did know her 'name' in Zee's language, what he always called her (because he couldn't pronounce her real one), really meant _sister_ , and that was cool, because that's what they were, in every way that counted. Certainly more than she and Griff had ever been.

But, what Canderous was really saying, she thought, now it was the five of them — she and Zee and Cina and Canderous and Sasha — versus the world. And that sounded even better.

Almost like a real family, but extremely dysfunctional and with more stealing things and shooting people.

Mission didn't say anything, she just stuck her tongue out at him. But she did close out her search for places to run away to, setting the project aside for now. She still planned to find a place to go eventually, she and Zee, they would make a new life for themselves somewhere, that still was and had always been the plan.

But she thought it could maybe wait for a little while.

* * *

In the end, their runaway Jedi wasn't particularly difficult to find.

The grove in question was less than twenty kilometres away, along a bend in the twisting, rapids-churned stream threading across the steppe shortly south of the town. The locals called it a river but it hardly rated as one, Cina could probably jump across it if she had to. (Of course, pulling from the Force _was_ cheating, but still.) It was hardly a ten minute trip by speeder to get to the treeline.

Honestly, getting a speeder had taken much longer than just getting there. She'd gone back to the ship to find Kandosa and the girls and the speeders were gone, still off on that little camping trip of theirs. Zaalbar offered to call them back for her — Mission had brought all her tech, despite being in the middle of nowhere, because of course she had — but Cina had waved him off. If those three were still having their...bonding time, or whatever, that was fine, those weren't the only speeders around. She could just walk if she really had to, though it would take a while. In the end, trying to borrow a speeder from the Jedi was so bloody tedious she almost did decide to just walk, took a half hour just to convince the officious little shite watching the garage she really did have a legitimate reason to use one, fucking pain.

(She suspected her former identity had been getting around the Enclave, among the Masters and older Jedi. Which was irritating, how cold and suspicious they all got — especially given that she still didn't know herself, and wasn't this all rather un-Jedi-like behaviour? — but there wasn't anything she could do about that.)

The grove had sprung up around a natural spring, draining into the nearby stream, the soil apparently rather thicker here, the granite shelf of the steppe a little bit further underground. Like the few other trees she'd seen on Dantooine spotted here and there, these were short and thick, the bark so dark it was almost black, the leaves a murky greenish-brown. They were packed so close together, in the little available space the softer earth around provided, there was absolutely no way she was getting the speeder through that mess.

Stepping through the threshold into the miniature forest she felt... Well, she wasn't sure what it was, but certainly nothing natural. There was something slightly off about the grove itself. She meant, the trees seemed perfectly ordinary, if not quite the shape and colour she was more familiar with, leaves rustling in the constant winds that scoured the steppe, the air crisp and fresh and sweet. But, despite that, it seemed oddly...quiet.

Birds, that was it. There weren't any birds. Dantooine had a ridiculously diverse avian population, the place was known for it in certain circles. The bloody things were everywhere. But not here, for some reason. Probably driven away by the subtle sense of danger on the air. _That_ wasn't natural at all, and she was certain she wasn't imagining it — rather like Rhysam's projections, though not quite the same thing, a moodily simmering undercurrent of bitterness and despair and blood carried on the Force, infecting the whole area with its echo, the sounds of her footsteps strangely muffled, the shadows seeming deeper.

Juhani was here. And the girl was in pain, Cina could taste it.

So, when dark shapes leapt out at her from between the trees, she was hardly even surprised.

She ducked out of the way of the first, stepped just aside of the second, her lightsaber springing to life neatly bisecting it as it passed. The solid purple light shoved the shadows back, allowing her to make out what her attackers were: kath hounds. The largest predator native to Dantooine she knew of off the top of her head, they struck her as holding a peculiar middle ground between canines and cervids — shaggy-furred pack hunters with long snouts split by toothy jaws, but also thick curving horns and limbs long and thin but powerful, built as much for leaping as running.

They might be rather awkward-looking, but that didn't make them any less deadly: their mouths were a mess of razors, and they could gore her just as easy. Also, there had to be a dozen of them surrounding her.

If she didn't have sodding magical powers, she'd probably be fucked.

She dodged a few more leaping hounds, lopping off the head of the one she had a good angle on, instinctively reaching out for that presence in the Force, that agony lingering over the entire grove. Because these animals weren't acting on their own, she knew that (somehow). And she could feel it, how that dark presence fed into them, subsuming their primitive wills, coercing them to strike. Cina couldn't say exactly how she knew what to do — not that that was a _new_ feeling, most of this Force stuff was like this, discovering things she already knew — she simply reached out to that compulsion crushing down on the animals and, even as she dodged another leap, _tore_ into it, ripping it into a million pieces with a single overwhelming assault.

She immediately turned around, forcing her own compulsion on the kath hounds, one much more simple, but all the more powerful for it: she made them _fear_.

All at once, with a chorus of ear-piercing cries, the animals fled.

Once again there was only the rustle of the leaves, the burbling of the spring just at the edge of hearing, nearly covered by the steady thrum of her lightsaber.

Cina switched it off, but didn't put it away, leaving the hilt held loosely at her hip. "There's no need for that, Juhani. I didn't come here to fight."

" _Then you will die_."

She felt the approaching mind before she heard or saw anything — besides the hissed warning, anyway, which hadn't seemed to come from any particular direction — a tight storm of pain and despair rapidly closing on her. With hardly a thought, Cina caught a lightsaber falling from behind, purple meeting blue. A snarling face, pale yellow-ish fur, eyes red and strained, robes torn and filthy, the girl's momentum carried her on, turning around Cina, her feet meeting the ground for only an instant, and she was gone.

And the grove was still again.

Cina held in a sigh — she just knew this was going to be a pain. Why did she keep getting thrown in with traumatised children? This was _not_ her area of expertise, okay, it was only a matter of time before she fucked something up very badly.

After a moment of hesitation, Cina closed down her lightsaber again. She had broken the girl's compulsions on the hounds, and fended off her surprise attack just as easily. Juhani had to realise she was outmatched. Unless she got a lucky break, anyway, but... Well, she wasn't an expert, but she was pretty sure waving around a lasersword while trying to talk down a traumatised child was counterproductive. "I'm not going anywhere. You may as well come out and talk."

"You shouldn't have come here, Master." The girl's voice was lower than Cina had expected, slow and awkwardly stilted, probably covering an accent. There was a bit of a hissing lisp to it, but that wasn't surprising — it could be difficult to clearly articulate Basic around prominent fangs, Juhani did look like she probably had them.

Despite the situation, Cina couldn't quite hold in a snort at the assumption. "Do I honestly look like a Jedi Master to you?"

With absolutely no warning, Juhani was attacking her again, this time falling at her back from almost directly overhead. Cina stepped slightly to the side, batted away the girl's follow-up slash with her bare hand, used the energy she pulled from it to weigh Juhani down, lock her to the earth tightly enough she couldn't just disappear again. Her blood-shot eyes widening with panic, a pulse of wild power broke apart Cina's sorcery, and in another instant she was gone.

And the grove was silent again, but there was something slightly different about the feel of it. Almost...pointed, as though the girl were saying, _Yes, obviously you're a Jedi Master, what else would you call that?_

Which, okay, she _did_ sort of have a point — exploiting tutaminis to catch a lightsaber blade bare-handed was rather absurd, but Cina had realised by now that she had been, and still was, rather absurd. It did take her a moment to summon the focus necessary, so it was still very possible to cut her down, but if she saw it coming in time she was pretty much invincible. (Though she could only absorb so much energy at once, hence slapping it aside and not holding onto it.) It was already obvious she had enough of an edge on Juhani she would always see it coming in time.

Honestly, she could probably take this girl unarmed and with both hands tied behind her back. By the sick tension in the air, Juhani knew she was hopelessly outclassed too.

Cina chewed on her lip for a moment, trying to decide what the fuck she was supposed to be doing with herself. She really was quite terrible at this sort of thing. "So... How about you come out of those trees and we have a chat?"

"Go away." Her voice was quieter than before, the harsh anger faded away, the heavy cloud carried through the Force turning all the heavier. "Just leave me alone."

With unexpected intensity, Cina felt her chest clench with pity. "I'm not going to leave you here to die, Juhani."

"What are you talking about?"

"That's why you're holed up here alone, isn't it? You came here to disappear, where nobody would find you and nobody would stop you." Pointless, since the Masters had known where she was the whole time, but still. "I know what giving up looks like, I'm not just gonna leave you to it."

That feeling on the air, Juhani's presence in the Force somehow diffused enough Cina couldn't pinpoint her, turned cold and sharp, claws pressed against her throat. "You're _wrong_ , I didn't come here to— This place is _mine_ , this is where I embraced the Dark Side, it's _mine_ and you're _not_ welcome here!"

Cina scoffed. "You call this the _Dark Side_ , really? Are you joking?"

"Shut _up_ , Jedi, you don't know my dark power—"

She failed to hold in a laugh. _Dark power_ , honestly...

In a perfectly predictable reaction to Cina's mockery, Juhani darted in from the trees again, this time leading not with her lightsaber but with the Force, a wave of power rising to crash down on her, hot and vicious and deadly. It was sort of impressive in the volume — Juhani certainly wasn't a _weak_ Jedi, no doubt about that — but not really in the character. This power Juhani had summoned in an effort to silence her, it wasn't anger or hatred, it wasn't any sort of will to inflict suffering or death, no, it was agony, it was despair, it was desperation and self-hatred.

This wasn't the Dark Side — this was a child in pain throwing a tantrum.

Cina dove into the Force, surfaced with a hard _push_ , the incoming wave turned aside and dispersed, Juhani plucked off her feet and tossed to slam into a tree a couple metres behind her. Frustration, petulant anger frothing through her and out, a thick gout of fire sprung from her hand, searing through the air between them, blue and purple and snapping cold, splashing against the tree, the ground around it, eerily silent, the only sound the crackling and popping of boiling sap. She pushed for a few seconds before releasing them, the unnatural flames quickly wisping away, leaving wood and grass and dirt scorched in its wake, a ring of frost condensed at the edges.

Juhani sat in the middle of the ring of devastation, completely unharmed. Which, obviously she was — she wasn't trying to hurt the girl, just make a point. Now that she was actually sitting still for two seconds, Cina could make out she was a juvenile Cathar, the fur thinly covering her face silverish-white, a few lines of a pale yellow on her cheeks and across her forehead leading into her hair (well, mane, technically), pulled back into a light golden plait. The Cathar face looked vaguely feline, very obviously not human, though not quite as extreme as Bothans — eyes and ears large and angled, a similar sort of wet nose, but the face in general rather flatter, the jaws far less dominant.

She stared up at Cina, yellow-orange eyes wide, sparks of fear flung from her mind sharp and nauseating.

Flailing, panicky power grasped at Cina, trying to push her back, hold her in place, iron bands threatening to tighten about her throat, but Juhani was too afraid, too unfocused, her hold on it far too loose. It was easy to tear the power out of her grasp, turning it right back at her. This time, it came as lightning — not quite proper Sith lightning, but something in the same family, not the will to cause suffering made manifest but instead disdain and frustration, _real_ Darkness pulsing from it in frigid waves — a cage of blue and white light surrounding Juhani, this time far more noisy, the booming and rattling of displaced air, the snapping of wood and the breaking of stone, too bright for Cina to see through it, almost too loud for her to make out the girl yelling in fright.

But, when the lightning was done, there the girl still sat, breaths high and thin and body struck with involuntary shivers, but completely unharmed.

Cina approached her, casually stepping over the scorched and broken forest floor, Juhani staring up at her all the while, too hopeless, too terrified to actually do anything. Soon she was standing over her — close enough Juhani could reach out and touch her, but she didn't do anything, just watched. "This isn't the _Dark Side_ you found here, foolish girl." She crouched down, bringing herself to Juhani's level. Reaching out, slowly, "This isn't Darkness. This," she said, poking Juhani over her heart (or where her heart would be on a human, anyway, wasn't familiar with Cathar anatomy), "this is _pain_. They aren't the same thing. Pain left to fester can lead you to the Dark Side, in time, but you're not there yet.

"So, Juhani..." Cina leaned back a bit, sat on the ground, her legs more sprawling before her than properly folded, forced her lips into something approximating a smile. "How about you try talking to me about it first?"

The look of dumbfounded disbelief on Juhani's face was just bloody hilarious, but laughing at her right now would probably be taken badly.

* * *

ilusite — _General term for lightsaber crystals, named after the planet they're often found on. In canon, the name for the crystals used in lightsabers is Adega, after the planet Adega, where they were first discovered...but there are serious problems with this. The Jedi mostly get their crystals on Ilum, and have since the early centuries of the Republic. However, the Adega system is in space that shouldn't even have been explored by the time of KotOR — it's in the same region of space as many of the original trilogy locations (Endor, Dagobah, etc), which was a comparatively newly-opened frontier at the time. True, Ilum is technically in the Unknown Regions, but it's only a short shot from Coruscant, the Jedi just keep it off official maps to protect the resource. Adega, on the other hand, is clear on the opposite side of the core from Coruscant, which makes the suggestion that the Order knew about it_ before _Ilum, for the name to have stuck, quite improbable. Hence my substitute name. (The name for the crystals isn't capitalised because we don't do the same thing in English, ex. andalusite from Andalusia.)_

[she was already, like...whatever the word like bilingual would be, but for five] — _Americans might think this sounds absurd, but it isn't it all unusual for people in more diverse societies to be at least passable in several different languages. It was very common in the ancient world, actually, even a large proportion of ordinary people were at least bilingual. Being perfectly fluent in more than two or three is a bit unusual, but being able to at least hold a conversation in five by Mission's age isn't really that hard to believe at all._

Denon — _Cina wouldn't actually consider this an option, Mission just threw out another "super-old super-rich Republic" world._

Juhani's age — _Most fanfic I've read (and even canon, arguably), tend to depict Juhani as an adult, perhaps late teens at the absolute youngest, but this doesn't quite seem to fit the facts of her background. We know Juhani was young during the Liberation of Taris, when the Revanchists beat back the Mandalorians and freed the slaves. It's not stated for certain_ how _young, but with how it's spoken of I'd guess six to twelve, maybe. That would have happened right near the end of the war, around 3960 BBY. The events of KotOR happen in 3956, only four years later; using the same estimate of her age, that should make her ten to sixteen. Given her particular brand of naïveté, I think mid-teens actually makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. (Of course, Cina doesn't actually know how old Juhani is when she's given the assignment, she's reacting based on the assumption that most of the apprentices are children.) Now, I did actually expand the timeline somewhat, to give events more time to develop properly, but even after that Juhani is still falling somewhere in her mid-teens, right around Mission's age._

 _Because, apparently Cina just going around collecting children is a thing now. I didn't plan that, it just turned out that way. This might have gotten kinda squicky if I'd actually planned on pairing Mission or Juhani on anyone xD_

* * *

 _Canderous is a gruff Mandalorian papa bear. This is fact, and I can't be convinced otherwise. Fight me._

 _Also, I think Mission teaching Sasha how to swear (im)properly as soon as possible is both 100% in character and 100% adorable._

 _I was originally going to write through Cina talking Juhani down, but we did just have a...somewhat similar conversation with Candi and Mission, and it would just be a bit tedious, didn't seem necessary. First scene next chapter will be Juhani pov, which will get across what exactly they talked about in a less annoying to write way. Bleh._

 _And, yes, update delay, I know. Depression is a thing, also distracted with other projects. Probably shouldn't take quite as long this time, but we'll see._


	16. Drawing Lines — VI

_Zhar stumbled across Lesami deep in the gardens, sitting in the grass at the edge of a pond._

 _This didn't come as a surprise, shouldn't to anyone who'd known her well. He couldn't count the times he'd tracked down Alek and Lesami somewhere among the Thousand Fountains at the Temple. Relaxing by one of the pools, nursing their wounds from a spar, perhaps, playing around with some esoteric bit of sorcery, or simply reading quietly. By the time Alek had officially become his padawan, if they hadn't some other obligation the two were virtually always together, and they seemed to prefer to spend that time in the nearest thing one could possibly find to outdoor gardens on Coruscant._

 _So, given the reputation she'd developed over the last years, while his colleagues might most expect to find Lesami engaged in some sort of dramatic exhibition in the arena, or perhaps in the library scouring the restricted sources the Council was attempting to bribe her with access to (not that they'd call it that), Zhar wasn't the slightest bit surprised. This sort of place was exactly where she belonged._

 _He hesitated a brief moment, staring at her back. He wasn't at all certain she would appreciate his company. Not that she ever had too much, when it came down to it. He was well aware Lesami considered him a painfully conventional, mindlessly obedient Jedi, if perhaps a comparatively inoffensive one. Boring, but not particularly annoying, if that made sense._

 _Honestly, he'd always found her opinion of him somewhat amusing — the High Council_ certainly _didn't think he was particularly conventional or obedient. He hadn't been thought of too well even since his apprentice days, though his reputation on Coruscant was thoroughly ruined now. In certain circles, he was blamed for Alek and Lesami, all the Revanchists, for yet another fracture through the heart of their Order. Oh, they didn't lay_ all _the blame at his feet, certainly not, and they never came out and said it. But they didn't truly have to, he could feel it in their eyes, the coldness on the air everywhere he went._

 _There was a reason he'd left the capital for Dantooine: he was now permanently tainted by association with Lesami, but the Jedi on the fringes tended to be far more forgiving of that sort of thing._

 _(Of course, he_ did _appear painfully conventional and mindlessly obedient compared against Lesami's own master, but by the standard set by Kreia so did they all.)_

 _But, for all that he wasn't Lesami's favourite person to associate with, neither had she ever found him especially irritating. He just wasn't certain he would be welcome right now. The war had changed her, certainly, she and Alek had come seeking the quiet and isolation of Dantooine for a reason. (Or so they claimed and the Council believed, Zhar himself was less than certain.) She was alone, even Alek was nowhere to be seen, and it was very likely she would prefer to remain alone._

 _He couldn't say for certain because, as usual, Lesami was nearly impossible to read. In the way of many of the more...intense Jedi, she burned in the Force, so brightly it almost hurt to look too closely, the more subtle shades of mood and intent harder to pick out. He_ could _figure it out if he truly wanted to, of course, but to filter out all the noise would require directly touching her mind — that was far more intrusive than a simple whim to sate his curiosity could_ possibly _justify. He doubted she would mind too much if he did, and she could certainly keep him out if she wanted to, but neither of those facts held any bearing on the fundamental immorality of the act itself._

 _And she did feel somewhat...different. It was subtle, but he knew her well enough, had known her long enough, that he could tell at a glance. She hadn't dimmed at all, no, if anything she'd only grown more powerful, more unignorable. But she seemed somehow sharper, somehow Darker — burning so bright, yes, but the brightest fire casts the deepest shadow, death and blood lingering unspoken under the surface._

 _Somehow...brittle. Like glass, hard and smooth and clear to the eye, but one good hit could send it shattering into scattered pieces._

 _He didn't know how much of that was an accurate impression of her state of mind or simply his imagination, what he_ wanted _to see. For all that trauma could lead one easily into the Dark Side, the thought she could possibly have gone through the war, seen so much and done so much, things messy and underhanded and at times just plain horrifying, the thought that she might have come out the other side untouched by it all was...unsettling._

 _Some of the other Masters worried Alek and Lesami had been corrupted by fear, by anger, by the terrible thrill of battle and death. Personally, Zhar found the possibility that they could have become deadened to it all far more concerning._

 _(Apathy laid the foundation for the greatest of evils, as Kreia liked to say.)_

 _So, while he wasn't certain she would welcome his company, neither was he certain he wanted to leave her alone. He did rather miss Alek and Lesami, no matter how he would deny such sentiments in the range of certain ears — he'd known them for years, for most of their lives, he'd taught them and traveled with them, he'd watched them grow up, it was only natural — but it wasn't that, not really. Certain things shouldn't be let alone to fester, and so coming off the war as she was, with the state of the galaxy yet so very tense and uncertain, if an opportunity to speak with her in confidence were handed to him he didn't think it wise to let it slip by. Yet at the same time, it would do no good to press himself on her if—_

 _Lesami let out a thin sigh, hardly audible over the incessant prairie wind. "You might as well get over here, Zhar. A proper conversation would be no more distracting than looming over my shoulder."_

 _Of course, she had noticed his presence, he shouldn't have expected otherwise. With a somewhat rueful smile, he walked closer, until he actually_ was _looming over her shoulder. At this angle, he could see there was a datapad in her lap — the screen was black, she must have turned it off as he'd approached. "I didn't mean to loom. I wasn't certain whether you'd want to see me."_

 _Lesami glanced up to give him a bemused sort of look, lips twisted and eyebrows skewed. "Why would I not want to see you?" He still couldn't read her — in fact, it was only more difficult to make out anything distinctive from this close — but she did_ sound _honestly confused._

 _For some reason, he smile turned rather more genuine. "Perhaps I was overthinking it."_

" _Nice to see some things don't change, I guess."_

 _Well._

 _Zhar took a seat next to her, and for long moments they said nothing, staring out over the little lake. He did rather like it here, no matter how foreign such a world was to him — he'd been born on Coruscant, the duracrete and steels and plastics had been all he'd known as a child, the pressing minds of the multitudes. He'd been to less populated worlds before, of course, but he'd never stayed on one so long. It was still somewhat strange, at times, some instinctive part of him still alien to such a place, but he found he did enjoy the quiet._

 _Given that she seemingly felt no need to talk, calmly sitting there, Lesami felt much the same._

 _In the end, he did speak first, choosing something innocuous, something safe. "You know, I didn't realise you even had a Navy uniform." She'd shown up in the thing, the unornamented black and Republic red of an enlisted crewman, and had apparently seen no need to take up Jedi dress again. (She never had much liked the robes, he recalled, had always avoided them when possible.) It was both an odd look for a Jedi and an entirely unfamiliar one. Some of the Revanchists had adopted appropriate military dress, yes, but Lesami was one of the ones who hadn't, sticking to her elaborate Revan costume._

 _And even now that the ruse was no longer necessary, it was...peculiar. He meant, she_ had _been Supreme Commander for a time there, and she hadn't relinquished her leadership of the defectors out on the rim — if she did mean to play the part, she_ should _be dressed as an admiral, not the lowest of officers. Of course, even on its own the uniform looked strange, conspicuously barren without any insignia of rank at all. It was said, her people had removed them, loaded them all onto a shuttle — along with thousands of recorded messages for the Senate, the rest of the military leadership, and even friends and family — and sent the thing on autopilot all the way to Coruscant._

 _Zhar guessed that was one way to tender a resignation._

 _Lesami glanced down at herself, shrugged. "I don't, I borrowed this for the trip. I didn't have a whole lot in the way of appropriate clothing with me on the_ Vigilance _, believe it or not. And I thought dropping in in the Revan getup might have...caused a stir."_

" _Yes, a_ stir _," he said, chuckling a little, "if you want to call it that. You might well have given poor Vrook a heart attack."_

 _She scowled. "Ugh, Lamar is a pain."_

 _He tried to hold in a smile at the unexpected (but familiar) childish petulance, but didn't quite manage it. "I take it you don't like him much."_

" _Excuse me,_ I _don't like_ him _? The way he talks to me you'd think I spent the whole war scorching cities to glass from orbit, or something."_

" _Yes, well. Vrook is...sensitive, to young Jedi leaving the Order as you and your friends have. He knew Exar Kun personally, you understand, the matter is nearer to home for him than many of the rest of us."_

 _Lesami sniffed, shaking her head to herself. "Honestly, comparing us to Kun's Brotherhood? They betrayed the Order, and started a war to bring the Republic to its knees; the Order betrayed_ us _, exiling us for fighting in a war to_ save _the Republic. Those are hardly the same thing."_

 _Zhar wasn't comfortable with Lesami's characterisation of events, but he couldn't say it was_ wrong _, exactly. It was more complicated than she made it sound. "I don't mean to suggest they are. I don't think Vrook is capable of being entirely rational when it comes to these matters."_

" _He's a bitter old arse, stop making excuses for him."_

 _Well._

" _I can't say I honestly expected much else from his kind, but I should think at least a_ little _gratitude would be in order. Here on Dantooine, they may have been far from the war, but I don't imagine Lamar would have been very happy if the Republic collapsed under its own weight from the pressure of the Mandoade invasion. And that_ is _what would have happened, nobody in the know disagrees on this — the Mandoade hadn't the resources to hold the core, but it didn't matter, the Republic would have fallen apart in any case. If the Jedi had had your way, our grand project of twenty thousand years would be over."_

 _Zhar couldn't honestly disagree with the core of her argument — even from the distance he had been at, it was quite clear that the Mandalorian invasion had presented an existential threat. In fact, semi-official ostracisation for his vocal disagreement on the High Council's approach to the war, not truly endorsing the Revanchists but not quite condemning them either, was a large part of why he'd left Coruscant in the first place. It wasn't the overall point, but a few choices of diction that concerned him. "If the Jedi had had_ our _way? Are you not a Jedi any longer?"_

 _Lesami shot him another dubious look. "Not according to the Council."_

" _That's not entirely accurate. You were never officially exiled, back at the beginning." When the original Revanchists had been cast out from the Order, Lesami hadn't actually been on the list — Zhar was certain the Council had known who Revan was, but even while she was tearing the Order apart they'd respected her desire to keep her identity hidden. He could only assume some faction among them had realised what she was doing was necessary, no matter how much they might not like it, so had endeavored to avoid sabotaging her, even while vilifying her and her followers. "Even now that everything is out in the open, they haven't exiled you, yet."_

 _She snorted. "No, they're hoping I'll recognise their authority over me and meekly slink back to Coruscant to submit myself and my comrades to their judgement."_

" _You're...probably not wrong about that." It was curious, after all, that they hadn't revoked her membership as they had all the others, but instead ordered that she return and bring all of her Revanchists with her. Hers was a reasonable conclusion. "If so, I really must question their wisdom. You were never the most obedient of Jedi, and I can't imagine the last few years have done anything to remedy that."_

 _Her lips twitching with a repressed smirk, Lesami drawled, "That would be a safe assumption."_

" _If I may ask: what are you doing here, then?"_

" _Hmm?"_

" _If you have no intention of rejoining the Order — and do give me some credit, Lesami, I don't buy the story you gave the rest of the— If you aren't coming back, why are you here?"_

 _Lesami stared at him for a long moment, her expression frank, evaluating. As though it were laid out before him, he could see she was weighing potential consequences, how much she could trust him. She moved to speak and, before even a single syllable had passed her lips, Zhar knew she'd decided she couldn't. "How much do you know about the Builders?"_

 _He blinked. "What?"_

 _A bit of fiddling with her datapad, and she passed it over, opened on an archeology index, he saw at a glance. "All across the galaxy there are relics of an advanced people long-vanished. The holocron is perhaps the most common example — the Kwa are often credited with it, but what little records we have of them suggest they borrowed it from another, older civilisation. The records we have on the invention of the hyperdrive explicitly state Durese and Corellian scientists collaborated to reverse-engineer technology found in old wrecks drifting out-system for who knows how long. The same is true of the hyperspace beacons — some of them were_ discovered _by the Republic, not built but modified to interface with our technology._

" _Those are the mundane examples, but some are far more impressive, things we can hardly imagine doing ourselves. The Dawn Pyramid on Aargau, the Temple of Esraza. Then there are projects at enormous scale, entire_ planetary systems _. I don't know if you've looked at the orbital mechanics of the Corellian system, but it's simply impossible — there is no natural process that could ever result in_ five _habitable planets around a single star, even just the double planets of Talus and Tralus, no, that just doesn't happen on its own. Some think even the Hapes cluster is artificial, which, there_ is _good reason to believe so._

" _And it's not just ruins and relics, there are stories as well. Dozens of peoples all around the galaxy tell of older races, some depicted as benevolent and some not so much. There are tales of similar-sounding alien technology, gifts and enslavement in equal measure, even strikingly similar motifs in art that hint at a common contact. Modern civilisations whose early days stretch back that far — the Columi, the Gree, the Herglics, the Hutts — they all have preserved fractured records of that time, speaking of a civilisation far older than they, and a devastating war that saw their downfall._

" _All the stories agree that this most ancient of peoples had mastered technology far beyond what we have now. And I wonder, sometimes, what we might rediscover, if we look carefully."_

 _Throughout Lesami's surprisingly long and energetic ramble on such an unexpected subject, Zhar could only stare at her, blankly blinking. Even when she'd finally stopped, it took him some moments to find his voice, too dumbfounded to speak. "That's... That's_ it _? That's the only reason you're here, to poke through what our library might have on these Builders of yours?"_

 _The silly girl had the nerve to look confused at the disbelief on his voice. "Yes. Well, no, not really — I believe the ruins scattered across Dantooine are some of theirs, and since this world was never significantly developed by a successor culture they should be relatively intact. But whatever the Jedi might have in the library is worth looking at too, yes."_

 _Zhar let out a sharp scoff. He tossed the datapad back to her, his head shaking, hard enough his lekku shifted against his shoulders. "Sometimes you still surprise me, Lesami. I suppose it shouldn't, but that you would do something like this now..."_

" _What are you talking about?"_

" _Do you have_ any idea _how dangerous the current state of things is?" Zhar heard the emotion on his own voice, instantly cut himself off. He paused a moment to breathe, releasing his frustration into the Force, desperately grasping for calm. (Lesami, surprisingly, waited.) "Lesami, your defectors make up a quarter of the entire fleet."_

 _She met his eyes, every hint of levity, of casual camaraderie completely gone. "Yes."_

" _You can't possibly think anyone in the Republic is taking this well."_

" _I don't imagine you are, no." He didn't miss the implication in her choice of pronouns — you, not we,_ you _. That wasn't a good sign._

" _Lesami..." He took another slow breath, in and out. "What are you doing? Playing around with this nonsense at a time like... We're sitting on the edge of a civil war, Lesami, you_ have _to know that. If you're not here to start moving toward a reconciliation, what_ are _you doing?"_

 _She didn't answer, for a long moment. Turning away from him, she looked out over the little lake — appearing still and calm to the casual eye, yes, but only on the outside. In the Force she appeared something quite else, tense and shadowed, something bitter and frustrated and...determined._

 _Something dangerous._

 _Finally she spoke, her voice low and slow, heavy with something more implied than directly said. "Reading about things like the Builders, it's all so clear how large the galaxy is, how long history. How small we are by comparison — one life among trillions, a few decades out of thousands. And yet, for all that..."_

" _Lesami..."_

" _Do you ever wonder, Zhar," she said, turning to meet his eyes, hers dark and heavy, "what people will say of this moment in history? Ten years from now, a thousand, ten thousand? From a distance, how this will all look, what will they think about what we choose to do, how we choose to do it? How will this moment be remembered, long after all but historians have forgotten our names?"_

 _It took some effort to keep his irritation off his voice, but he mostly managed it. "Clearly Kreia was a terrible influence on you — don't couch your intent in riddles, Lesami, just come out and say it."_

 _A smile flickered at her lips, just for a second. "This may seem like a dangerous moment, Zhar, but in the end this moment is so very small. We can't let passing uncertainty and fear dissuade us from doing what our position demands of us."_

" _That's not really any clearer."_

" _How about this, then? I will do what I feel is right with the circumstances I am presented with, evaluated from my understanding of the totality of all our fellow sapient beings and the ephemeral moment we find ourselves in. It doesn't matter what the Senate or the Council or anyone else tries to tell me to do — they are but a tiny few among an uncountable many, their interests no more important than anyone else's. I don't think you expect anything less of me._

" _Now, if you'll excuse me..." She smoothly pushed herself up to her feet, the datapad vanishing into a pocket, her paired lightsabers clinking against her belt. "...Alek is back with our speeder, and we have work to do. Until next time, Master."_

" _Yes." Zhar stared at her back as she walked off, steps even and casual, and his fingers twitched to..._

 _To do what, exactly? Whatever it was she was planning to do, he doubted he would at all approve — he hardly ever had approved of these insane ideas Lesami got into her head, she always had been...radical, foolhardy. He might well find himself standing against her, whatever it was she meant to do this time. It even felt quite likely._

 _The entire Republic had been holding their breath, since so much of the fleet had defected. They were all possessed of a quiet dread, waiting for the next step. Nobody he'd spoken with thought it would end well._

 _But, well, Lesami wasn't wrong: he_ didn't _expect anything else of her. She would do what she felt she must, as she had for years now. He doubted he could convince her, stop her._

 _He could only hope, watching the girl he'd once known leave him behind once again, that she wouldn't do anything too foolish this time._

* * *

By the time they sent the boy for her, Juhani had already been awake for hours.

She'd known she'd be called to the Masters eventually, though that's not why she'd already gotten up — no, she hadn't had much choice in the matter. It'd been dusk, when they'd gotten home last night, but it hadn't really been properly late yet. Juhani had gone pretty much straight to bed — she'd been _tired_ , she didn't think she'd ever been so tired in her life — so the natural time to be awake was hours before it was quite necessary.

She had still been in her room when the little apprentice boy had come for her. (She didn't recognize him, but she didn't know most of the children, they had little reason to interact much.) She hadn't really done much of anything since waking up, in the dead hours of the early morning, everything quiet and still and heavy. If anyone bothered asking when she'd been doing sitting in her room for hours, which she doubted anyone would, she'd probably say she'd been meditating — that was an appropriate thing for a Jedi to be doing with her time, they were expected do a quite unreasonable amount of meditating on a regular basis. But she hadn't been, really, she'd just been...

...waiting.

That's what it felt like, like she was waiting for something. She couldn't say exactly what. For this meeting with the Masters? That _would_ make sense, but she didn't really think so. It was something both less and more than that, something not entirely conscious, something she anticipated without really knowing what it was. _Something_ was supposed to happen, she knew that, something big and important.

It didn't feel right, somehow. Being back at the Enclave, in this room. She didn't know why, it just didn't.

When the boy came for her, first thing in the morning, said the Masters were waiting for her, it'd almost felt like what she'd been waiting for. Almost, but not quite. Because as she got up — she was stiff from sitting in one place too long, still so _tired_ , her body feeling heavier and clumsier than it should be — it _did_ sort of feel like a resolution, that unspoken anticipation coming together, but...not entirely. If anything, as the boy led her through the yet quiet halls of the Enclave, she only felt all the more tense, all the more uncertain.

Juhani didn't know what she was doing here. This didn't feel right, somehow.

The windows in the Council tower were aflame with sunrise — it was still early, the sky all reds and yellows, the shadows long, the first glare of proper sunlight shining against the glass. Backlit as they were, the Masters' faces were in shadow, their features rather more difficult to pick out than they usually were. There was a peculiar tension in the air, something thick and heavy, _waiting_. Or maybe that was just her. Their faces too dark to make out, she only had their presence in the Force to go on, and the Masters of the Council were all so bright and overwhelming, and they never really changed much moment to moment, it was impossible to tell.

Through the oppressive silence, Juhani walked to the center of the circle at the middle of the room. She folded her hands behind her back, mostly to keep herself from fidgeting. And she waited.

(She counted the figures around her, realized Quatra wasn't here. She tried not to think about that.)

"You have returned to us." Tokare's voice was its usual low grumble, even and steady, completely emotionless. Which wasn't at all helping her read the mood of the room.

With no better ideas what she should do, she simply said, "Yes."

"You have done well, Juhani."

For a few seconds, the words simply didn't process. She stood there, blinking at them like an idiot, that tension, that anticipation dissolving into confusion. She hadn't thought that was something she'd ever hear from the Council. She thought they'd never welcome her back, ever. She'd been mostly certain they would have her killed.

When Cina had found her, that's what she'd thought, that the Council had sent someone to execute her for the murder of her Master, for her fall to the Dark, for her betrayal. Of course, no, of _course_ they hadn't, thinking the Masters would have her summarily killed really was quite ridiculous. They _were_ Jedi, after all. She simply hadn't been in her right mind at the time. And when Cina had made it clear that hadn't been at all what she was there for, that she only wanted to talk, she wanted to _help_ , that she'd _killed her Master_ and made an (admittedly childish) attempt to embrace the Dark Side and they _still_ weren't taking her seriously, she...

It'd been _humiliating_. It was still uncomfortable to think about.

The point was, it hadn't taken long for Cina to explain she _hadn't_ killed her Master, Quatra was still alive and well. Which, that had _also_ been humiliating, in a way (though perhaps that wasn't quite the right word), that Quatra hadn't come for her herself, she'd sent some stranger to drag her back instead. She hadn't known what to think about that then, didn't know what to think about Quatra not being here now.

Juhani had been completely convinced Quatra was dead, completely convinced the Council would cast her out or simply kill her for it. Even if she'd survived, attacking in anger and seriously injuring your Master wasn't exactly acceptable behavior for a Jedi. It was hardly better, really.

She _certainly_ hadn't expected anything that sounded even remotely like _approval_.

It took quite a while to find her voice. When she finally did, all she could think to say was, "I don't understand."

It was Lamar who answered, his normally sharp voice only slightly blunted. Juhani heard him, but not really, the words cresting over her head. She couldn't pick out the words, too dazed to sort through them one by one, but the meaning filtered through all the same. Something about how they were living in dangerous times, and the temptation of the Dark Side, and all apprentices needing to face it in a relatively controlled setting, and that...

...she'd passed her trial.

Except, she hadn't, not really. She knew about this, the trial they were talking about. It was something all Jedi were expected to undergo in one way or another before their ascension to full knighthood, that they would somehow come face to face with the Darkness in the universe and in themselves. That they would face it, and reject it.

But she _hadn't_ rejected it.

She realized now that she'd had no idea what she'd been doing, she'd just... She hadn't known what the Dark Side was, not really. Not until Cina had looked at her with eyes empty and cold as the depth of space, had thrown fire and lightning at her, power pulsing off of it thick and sickening and _wrong_ , it'd been terrifying and _horrifying_ , she'd recoiled from it instinctively, and then...

...and then Cina had gone back to normal. She did burn in the Force, hot and bright and...not Dark, certainly not that, but not exactly like a Jedi either. It was hard to explain.

But that wasn't right. It was said, the Dark Side was a corruptive thing — once someone had touched it it became a part of them, it would rule them forever, there was no truly escaping it. That was part of why she'd thought the Masters would... She was lost forever, there was no going back. But Cina had been filled with it, for the blink of an eye, and then, in another blink, it'd been gone.

Just as Juhani had touched it, much more superficially, and yet here she stood. Presumably it hadn't done anything permanent, the Council was right there and if they'd noticed they would have said something...

(Though she did feel...weird.)

But, if that had been her trial, certainly she'd _failed_ it.

Her trial.

That...had been a test? Quatra, when she'd said...

That had been a test?

She'd done it on purpose. Quatra had, on purpose, said just what she thought she had to to make Juhani angry.

To make her hurt.

She'd done it _on purpose_.

For the shortest moment, the thought suffocated before the Masters could feel anything wrong, Juhani wished she hadn't come back.

She coasted through the rest of the conversation on autopilot, she took in very little of it. Which was quite unfortunate, really, she would think — Juhani had dreamed of little else but becoming a Jedi Knight, ever since the Revanchists had liberated Taris when she'd been a child. And here the moment had come, her official investiture as a full member of the Order, and she barely heard a word of it. She was hardly present, just...drifting.

It'd been a test. Quatra had done it on purpose.

This was wrong, she shouldn't be here.

She was released, eventually, with much praise and congratulation, and she was back in the hall. The tall double doors clicked closed behind her, and Juhani stood there for a moment, staring at the wall across from her.

She should be happy, that she was a full Jedi Knight now. (Or, would be, as soon as the Masters' commendation got back to the Temple on Coruscant and it was confirmed.) She should be angry, that Quatra had done it on purpose, that she'd tried to hurt her on purpose, just as a test. (A test that, Juhani couldn't help but think, _might_ be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Dark Side.) She _should_ be confused, about that — that she'd touched the Dark and come back, that Cina could submerse herself in it and come out unscathed — it contradicted everything she'd been taught, ever since she'd come here, young and alone and so desperately hopeful.

Instead she felt nothing.

Slowly, as though on autopilot, Juhani turned, drifted through the halls of the Enclave. She was nearly at the refectory when she paused, staring blankly at the glass wall separating it from the courtyard. She could see them in there, the other Jedi of the Enclave, feel their minds warm and soft and smooth, the low murmur of whispered conversation slipping through the door. Her peers now, many of them, and looking at them, the thought of going in there to have breakfast, she...

Something was wrong. She shouldn't have come back.

A few minutes later, she was lying in the grass at the edge of a pond, staring up at the gentle swaying of the leaves over her head. She didn't remember Cathar, not really, her parents had left well ahead of the Mandalorian invasion. And lucky they did — the Mandalorians had wiped out over ninety percent of all the people on her homeworld, she'd likely have been killed with them. She knew, mostly from descriptions in the library, that Cathar was in many ways quite similar to Dantooine: it was a world of endless rolling plains stretching horizon to horizon, patched here and there with thick forest. Though, for whatever reason, the flora of Cathar had developed to a monolithic scale, these forests stretching to the skies like skyscrapers of bark and leaf, large enough cities had been carved along their trunks and sprawling across their branches.

(The wildlife was of a scale with the trees, apparently — the fauna of Cathar were famously large and infamously deadly, her people adapted physically and culturally to survive in the hostile environment. It was assumed that was part of why the Mandalorians had been so interested in their world in particular.)

She had only the vaguest memories, more feelings than anything. Sitting in the open air, under the branches of these much smaller trees, the wind chattering through the leaves and tickling at her fur, she could almost taste it — a life long gone and mostly forgotten, simpler and cleaner and safer.

Juhani knew that, for a while after moving to Taris, she'd been absolutely miserable. She'd hated it, at first, absolutely hated it, the still air and the synthetic landscape, everything hard and cold and dead and wrong, but in time she'd gotten used to it. She'd thought she'd forgotten all about her homeworld, until she'd found her way to Dantooine and it'd felt almost like coming home, some deep, instinctive part of her relaxing.

Unfortunately, no matter how much she might be comfortable with the world, she'd never grown quite so comfortable with the Enclave, and the other Jedi in it.

"Hello, there."

Her heart jumping up into her throat, Juhani popped up to sitting, scrambling to face the man who'd snuck up on her. (Trying not to look as guilty as she felt, with that last thought she'd just had, belatedly remembering she shouldn't _feel_ guilty either, a Jedi would notice that...) She was rather surprised to see it was Rhysam, the Zeltron wanderer who'd appeared a few weeks ago. She was certain they'd never spoken — she wasn't the most sociable person to begin with, but she'd been avoiding Rhysam in particular.

Juhani glared at him for a long moment, what had to be nearly a minute, before realizing she never had responded. Oops. "Oh, hello."

A smirk twitched at the man's soft human lips, dark eyes dancing in the thin morning light. "What are you doing out here, kid?"

"Am I not allowed to be out here?"

"Oh, you are, of course." Completely ignoring her continued glaring, the older Jedi sank to the ground next to her, flopping back to lay down in the grass. "I just thought you'd be hungry. You know, after hanging out in the wilderness by yourself for who knows how long."

...He wasn't entirely wrong, Juhani couldn't remember the last she'd eaten. She _had_ during those days, she knew that, it was just kind of...fuzzy. She certainly hadn't eaten very much, or very often, so she _should_ probably be hungry.

(Instead she felt nothing.)

But she didn't want to talk about that. She'd rather not talk to this man at all, in fact, but she doubted she had much choice in the matter. "What do you want?"

"Nothing much — Cina just told me about your little adventure, and I thought I'd check in."

Juhani felt her face twist into a snarl, just for an instant before she caught herself. "You mock me."

"What part of that sounded like mockery, exactly? Believe me, when I _do_ mock you, you'll know." One of his eyes peeked open, squinting up at her. "Would you relax? Really now, I'm not here to be an asshole. I just thought I'd see how you're doing now, since Cina is busy dealing with the Council at the moment."

"How much did she tell you?"

"How am I supposed to know? I only know what she told me, so I can't possibly know what proportion that is of all there is to know, you know?"

Juhani could pretend to be surprised that Cina had gone babbling about what had happened in that grove to Rhysam, but she wasn't, really. As much as she did tend to keep to herself, even Juhani had heard the gossip going around about the two of them — she doubted there was anyone in the Enclave who didn't know they were sleeping together.

What she _didn't_ know was why the Masters were seemingly doing nothing to intervene, or even openly express disapproval. But that wasn't really her business.

She didn't know what to think about Cina telling Rhysam about it, or what she was supposed to say now. The whole thing was just sort of...

Well, it didn't really matter what Juhani said to him, did it? It wasn't like anything potentially incriminating would get back to anyone who mattered — she hadn't missed that most of the other Jedi had no clue what to do with Rhysam either, the only person at the Enclave he really spent that much time around was Cina. The Masters hadn't seen fit to explicitly censure him, but that didn't mean that everyone else approved of him, or quite knew how to talk to him. Juhani never had spoken to him, no, but she'd heard he was a bit...odd. Which, to be fair, that wasn't particularly unusual for an independent Jedi, trained and operating outside the influence of the High Council. There were quite a few of those, Jedi who'd refused to conform to the Exis Reformations and their students, and they never did quite fit in with mainline Jedi culture.

Which was...fine, she thought? Sure, the High Council, and the various other subordinate Councils at Enclaves and Temples around the galaxy, did say these defectors were in the wrong, that they were at greater risk of falling to the Dark. But, at the same time, they'd made no moves to oppose them directly, no efforts to force them to rejoin the Order. So it was probably fine. Maybe.

Though, it did make her wonder. If there were Jedi who lived outside the prescriptions of the High Council, whose eccentricities were tolerated for the most part, didn't that mean... Well, didn't it make the Council's claims of what was necessary to avoid the corruption of the Dark Side a bit...fuzzy? She meant, that some people just flatly ignored the Reformations after the last Schism, designed with the intention to prevent another, didn't that sort of suggest the Reformations were unnecessary? It certainly seemed to.

(The Revanchists had mostly been trained in the post-Exis Order, so it kind of looked like they didn't work, either...)

If the Reformations weren't intended to stop another Schism, Jedi falling to the Dark, what _were_ they for?

It was probably politics — the Jedi _had_ roped the entire Republic into a civil war, after all, it wasn't unreasonable for the civilian government to demand reform. Juhani didn't like thinking about that possibility, though. It made her feel...uncomfortable.

But, the point was, Rhysam was already living outside the strictures of the Order. He wasn't particularly likely to judge her for not perfectly living up to the image of a proper Jedi, or run to tell the Masters about it. It wouldn't be like talking to any of the Masters, or even some of her fellow apprentices. She didn't have to censor herself.

"I don't understand what's going on."

She'd blurted it out, without really thinking about it. One of Rhysam's eyebrows ticked up, giving her a sort of evaluating look, his presence in the Force still and steady. "What don't you understand?"

"I..." Juhani hissed, turning away from him. For a long moment, she looked out over the pond, trying to organize her fuzzy thoughts. "Did Cina tell you what happened, when I left the Enclave?"

"You attacked your Master, right? That stuffy human woman with the nasally voice... Quatra, was it?"

Juhani half-expected to feel annoyed with Rhysam bad-mouthing her Master — she certainly had had issues with people doing that in the past, over far less problematic statements. Instead she felt nothing. "Did Cina tell you why?" She hadn't spelled it out for Cina either, exactly, but she hadn't needed to. Cina had understood without Juhani needing to explain anything more than the general outline.

(It was still hard to believe that Cina was only an apprentice, and a new one at that. She was far too powerful, far too practiced, far too perceptive to be anything but a Master.)

Rhysam let out a short hum. "Not really? Something about her being a bitch, but she didn't say exactly what."

Automatically, Juhani turned to chew him out for speaking of Quatra like that...and then stopped, frowning to herself.

She'd said those things, those horrible things, on purpose. She'd _tried_ to hurt her. On purpose. Juhani wouldn't put it like that herself, but was Rhysam really wrong? She was extremely uncomfortable with the thought, but...

Shaking it off as best she could, Juhani moved on. "It was a test, I know now."

"Confronting the Shadow."

Juhani nodded — she recognized the term, a somewhat archaic one for an apprentice being forced to acknowledge the Dark within themselves, and turn from it. "Yes. And...I _failed_ , I..." She gripped her knees to stop her hands from shaking, the echo of it lingering — her chest tight and hot, her vision narrowing to Quatra's face, her head full of thoughts vicious and bloody, and her lightsaber was in her hand, she could hear it, the thrum of barely-contained plasma, the hissing of superheated water as it sheared through— Juhani shook her head, swallowed hard, tried to work out the knot in her throat. "I was so...so _angry_.

"I, just, pulled out my lightsaber and cut her down, in an instant. I didn't think about it, I hardly realized what I was doing. I only thought of making her _stop_ , I was so _angry_ , and... I didn't really know what I was doing, I know now I know nothing of the Dark Side, but my fall was real. I _meant_ to turn from the Light, even if I didn't know what that truly meant, I thought I already had. By any reasonable evaluation, I failed."

"Guessing by the fact that you're sitting here right now, the Masters don't quite see it like that." There was a faint hint of derision on Rhysam's voice — not for her, Juhani somehow knew, but directed at the Masters of the Council. This wasn't really a surprise either, refusing to recognize the authority of the Councils was what made Jedi like Rhysam different from the rest of them.

Juhani sniffed. "They congratulated me on my success, and promoted me. I don't... I don't understand. I _failed_ , they should have... It just doesn't...seem right, somehow. I'm not explaining this very well."

"No, you are, I get it." Rhysam stopped there, but he wasn't done — she could feel it, not exactly a tension, but a deliberation, working through exactly how to say what he wanted to. "If the Masters aren't holding you responsible for your actions, clearly they don't consider you responsible for your actions."

"... I don't understand."

"It's quite simple, when you think about it. Take me, as an example, or the handful of other Zeltron Jedi around. We're not expected to hold to the rules against personal attachments the rest of the Jedi do. It's not just me, and not just Zeltrons — there are other highly social beings that get the same special dispensation. Masters have even written about it, that some beings require social attachment more than others, that forcing them to suppress their natural inclinations will only lead to psychological distress that will inevitably drive them into the Dark Side.

"You'll notice the Council here doesn't say anything about my more controversial behavior. If you go back to the records from Sesai's time on Coruscant, before the war, you'll see the Masters at the Temple there didn't try to stop him from developing personal relationships either. They were unhappy when those relationships were with _other_ Jedi, they tried to get _them_ to stop, but a Zeltron? No, they can't _be_ stopped from doing what comes to them naturally. Clearly, we can't be held responsible for our actions."

The implication he was making was obvious. Juhani wasn't being held to the same standard another Jedi would be in her situation because the Council thought she couldn't be. That, at some level, what she'd done had simply been what was expected. She'd struck down her Master in anger, yes, but she'd turned from the Dark later, she'd come back in the end. That this was the best that could be expected of her.

That this was the best that could be expected of Cathar.

That was the implication, of what Rhysam was saying. That she was being given a pass, because Cathar couldn't be expected to control themselves the same way other beings could, so she wasn't fully responsible for her actions.

In a way, they weren't even entirely wrong. Her homeworld was a dangerous, violent place, that was certainly true — to adapt to their environment, her people had developed what much of the rest of the galaxy would consider a primitive, bloody warrior culture. She knew, from reading about it, that the Cathar psychological profile was noticeably different than that of baseline humans. To put it briefly, they were on a shorter fuse — their fight-or-flight response was more easily triggered, and they tended to prefer the former in most situations, weighting conflict over avoidance, anger over fear. When they weren't under threat, Cathar were of course just as rational and intelligent as anyone else, but...

It wasn't entirely out of nowhere, for the Masters to believe such a thing. But...

But they still...

She might have expected herself to feel angry, in this moment. Rhysam was implying (probably correctly) that the Council thought the same things of her she'd been hearing from her peers ever since she'd gotten here. That she wouldn't make it, that she wasn't suited to this life, that she didn't have the temperment to be a Jedi, not really. It was the same thing, she'd heard it over and over, for years.

It was the same sort of thing Quatra had said. Trying to hurt her, cutting to the core of those insecurities that had built over years, on purpose, the same thing, _the same thing_...

That the Council (might) think the same thing of her, she might have thought that would make her feel angry.

Instead, she just...

Maybe they were right. Maybe she didn't belong here, with them.

Which wasn't to say she didn't still want to be a Jedi, of course not! No, she'd never wanted anything else. But if she were being perfectly honest with herself...

Her original inspiration to seek to join the Order hadn't been the actions of _proper_ Jedi. No, her inspiration had been the Revanchists, and by the time they'd come to Taris they'd long since ceased obeying the Council, ceased being proper Jedi. They weren't Sith yet, no, and her teachers here had always argued their rejection of the Jedi way of life was what had ultimately lead them to the Dark Side, but...

If that were so, why did nomadic Jedi like Rhysam still exist? Why were they not opposed with the same vehemence the Revanchists and later the Sith were? If it were simply about obeying the Council, she would think they would be considered equivalent evils. But no, the wandering Jedi of the galaxy were...almost revered in a way, some of them — some of the Masters operating outside of the Order were among the greatest and most highly-respected Jedi in their history, after Exis and stretching back long, long before.

The Council, clearly, did not dictate the only way to be a Jedi. Not really.

Maybe... Maybe she truly _didn't_ belong here. People had always said so, and maybe they were right. But they _weren't_ right that she couldn't be a Jedi, no — there was more than one way to be a Jedi.

She could be one of those wandering Jedi. Going where the Force guided her, acting as she willed, helping the people who needed help, whether she was ordered to or not, whether the Order or even the Republic wanted her to intervene or not. She could serve the Light as she thought was appropriate, she didn't need anyone to tell her what was the right thing to do. She could figure it out for herself.

The thought was rather scary — it was a precarious life, going along without support and without guidance, just...herself.

But, in a way, it felt...right. The idea of doing that, of being one of those unattached, nomadic Jedi, it felt right. More than _this_ ever had, shut up in an Enclave in the middle of nowhere, listening to lectures and meditating and...

Maybe she didn't belong here. But maybe that was okay.

"If I wanted to..." Juhani trailed off for a moment, choked by a sudden flare of panic, that he would tell someone, that he woudn't– that he would laugh at her, or...

"Hmm?"

"If I wanted to do what you do, to just, _go_ , and...do the wanderer thing. I don't know how to do that, I've never been on my own, and..."

Juhani wasn't looking at him, still staring out over the pond, but she didn't need to to feel the warmth of his smile on the air. "I suspect Cina's going to be given a mission in a few days here, a very open-ended, complicated sort of thing. We'll be leaving the planet together — she has a ship, you see. You can come with, if you like. I have the feeling there's a lot you can learn from the two of us."

She wasn't certain, still, that this was the right thing to do — Cina and Rhysam were _hardly_ the most conventional sort of Jedi. But, despite herself, she almost thought she might be relieved.

* * *

There was something about this place. Cina could feel it on the air — an echo on the Force long since faded, something at once overwhelmingly powerful and incomprehensibly distant. So weakened with time what had once held imposing majesty was now faded and empty, bones of a much larger entity left to rot. A feeling leeched into the stone and the dirt and the living grass, subtle but present, of loss, of absence, a deep longing for what once had been, dwindled away over the millennia down to a black sort of faint nostalgia.

In a word, as she remembered Lesami saying in that vision she and Bastila had gotten, this place was mourning.

The debacle with Juhani settled to their satisfaction — though, their handling of the poor girl had only made Cina _more_ certain the Masters were full of shite, which _probably_ wasn't what they were aiming for — she'd finally been sent off to the ruins Lesami and Alek had investigated during their brief visit to Dantooine. Bastila had been uncomfortably silent the whole trip over, her mind feeling all too tight and anxious, but luckily it hadn't taken very long, the ruins sitting only a dozen kilometres east of the Enclave. Which might sound like a peculiar coincidence, that it was so close to where the Jedi had elected to settle, but it truly wasn't — Cina recalled that the Enclave was built overtop a sprawling subterranean ruin, presumably dating to the same period. It seemed plausible that there'd once been a city in the area, that the handful of ancient structures dotted here and there were all that remained.

The ruin itself was...curious. It reminded Cina of nothing else but tombs built by archaic megalithic cultures spread all across the galaxy. At the centre was what looked very much like a burial mound, a rounded hill of earth covered in a layer of short grasses, around the edge and poking through in a few places bits of brown-ish local stone and a gleaming black-silver metal. There were hints of some sort of embellishments, subtle and naturalistic, but it was mostly gone now, worn away over eons to leave behind only nubs. The sole clearly artificial part of it was a wide double door of that peculiar metallic substance, glinting in the shadows of an overhang of crudely-carved stone, itself looking very modern. It was an oddly anachronistic juxtaposition of construction methods, Cina could only assume that had held some sort of cultural significance for whoever had built it.

Surrounding the mound were what looked very much like standing stones, pillars with sharply-angled corners extending out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel, stretching up easily three times Cina's height. They weren't actually made of rock, instead more of that black metal she didn't recognise. In fact...

Leaving Bastila by the speeder — the younger woman seemed to be bracing herself, her mind hardening against the ruin's weight in the Force — Cina walked up to the nearest outcropping of metal, laid her hand against it. The thing felt unfinished, as though the builders had simply stuck pillars of raw, half-processed metal into the ground, but the texture felt too regular. Like a pattern were etched into the surface at a tiny scale, so small it was hardly even perceptible to the eye, for some arcane purpose she couldn't begin to guess. It felt...odd. Closing her eyes, she reached into it, searching its length, then further, following a feeling she couldn't quite express down into the earth, several metres under her feet, but the huge rod of metal didn't end, instead spread out, curving around in all directions into something like...

...like an _antenna_.

"Pardon?" At some point, Bastila had overcome her reluctance, now standing shortly behind her. She had a displeased, wary sort of look on her face, watching Cina _very_ closely, as though waiting for her to do something unpleasant.

Which wasn't at all unusual behaviour for Bastila, Cina didn't let herself linger over it. "These big metal things sticking out of the ground all over the place? They're prongs of an antenna. We're standing on top of an enormous subspace relay."

Frowning to herself, Bastila turned, eyes scanning over the monoliths surrounding them. "That seems...impractical. I can't imagine a civilization that achieved interplanetary spaceflight could possibly need a device this large to transmit through subspace."

"You're right, of course. Working on a guess here, but I think this relay was designed to operate on as little power as possible with minimal maintenance for as long as possible. It feels to be harnessing the gravitational field of the _planet itself_ to penetrate into subspace, so they don't need to use more intricate but less reliable methods."

Bastila's eyes went very wide. "Is that even possible?"

"Evidently, it is. Don't you feel that? The relay is still operational, who even knows how many millennia later."

"So if anyone's listening in, they know we're here."

Cina shrugged. "Possibly. But I doubt it — a relay like this, I suspect we'd feel it if it broadcast anything. In fact, I suspect that was the disturbance the Jedi felt when Lesami and Alek came here, a subspace radio operating on a planetary scale would _definitely_ create some kind of echo on the Force."

"A reasonable assumption." Once again, Bastila warred against her clear wariness, face slowly smoothing out into blank Jedi placidity. "Should we move on?"

Cina considered pointing out that she'd been waiting on Bastila for a couple minutes now, but there would really be no point to that.

The closer they walked toward the door, the thicker that mournful echo in the Force became, a gradually increasing weight of sorrow hanging over their heads. (It felt rather similar to her own misery she'd been dealing with for a while there, if colder and less intense, but external, and thus far easier to ignore.) Before long they were stepping into shadow, standing before the door itself — it was rather modest in size, compared to the prongs of the relay just outside, Cina could reach up and touch the frame at the top, enough room for two people to walk abreast but not much more. But it was still built thick and heavy, blocky shapes of hard metal. There was no way they were breaking through _that_ , it would probably take ages to burn through with their lightsabers — assuming they'd even have much success melting this stuff at all, which Cina honestly doubted.

Bastila was apparently coming to the same conclusion. "How are we supposed to get through this?"

Despite herself, Cina turned a smirk on the younger woman. "Here I thought we got the same vision. Weren't you paying attention?"

She scowled, just for a second before she caught herself, the expression again vanishing behind a mask of Jedi equanimity. "The experience was quite overwhelming, if you recall."

"Maybe for you, that one wasn't that bad by my standards — I _really_ don't like visions."

"Yes, I've noticed that. Did you have an idea, then?"

"Just one." Cina reached out, not with her hand but with her mind, touching the door through the Force. There were some kind of symbols carved into the ether — _somehow_ , the idea was both absurd and fascinating when she thought about it — a line of foreign script arching over the door, a steady throb of power restrained sitting fixed among the local currents. Without thinking about it too hard, Cina forced a tendril of power into them, and they flared into sudden life, rivulets of energy extending into the mound and—

Cina cringed as light and noise exploded all around her, a deafening rattling shaking her bones, sending her teetering against the doorframe, blinded by a flare of power brighter than the sun, and something enormous and unstoppable exploded into motion, surging around them, then down, then _up_ , stretching up for the sky, and then far beyond it, casting a desperate plea out and out and _out_ —

It took a moment for Cina to realise the earthquake and the fire she'd nearly been overwhelmed by weren't actually physical, instead something she felt only through this ridiculous sixth-sense absurdity, amplified due to her still being in direct contact with the thing making it. She pulled her mind away from the script above the door, and the flood of unpleasant sensations immediately dropped away, reduced to a subtle throbbing on the air more felt than heard.

At some point while she'd been distracted, the door had split, ponderously swinging open, the passage beyond entirely hidden in darkness. "I think it's safe to say the relay still works."

Bastila's face had gone rather pale, staring in a random direction above her head to the left. "Do you think, was that an alarm of some kind?"

"Hmm." It _did_ sort of feel like that might be it — the shuddering of power in the air had already faded, the short, intense burst ending as quickly as it'd begun, but it had seemingly been directly tied to the door being forced open. "I suppose that's possible. The Builders are long gone, though, there's probably not anybody on the other side." It was possible there was a remnant of their civilisation somewhere out there, but...

"Except Malak, perhaps."

Cina shrugged. "I don't see why that should matter. It's not like he doesn't already want both of us dead — following along behind his and Lesami's inexplicable archaeological expedition might make getting rid of us more urgent, but we were already on his list."

For some reason, Bastila gave her a _very_ strange look, narrow and suspicious, an echo on the Force of something that almost felt like fear, just for an instant before she caught herself. "Why do you say that? Malak certainly wants _me_ dead, but should he even know you exist?"

Automatically, Cina opened her mouth to answer — _of course_ Alek wanted her dead, probably more than Bastila, it was silly to suggest otherwise — and she froze before even getting the first syllable out. Because...well, how _should_ he know Cina existed? She had the feeling, instinctively, that this was definitely true, that Alek really, _really_ hated her and would stop at nothing to kill her, but she couldn't remember why this was. Some half-remembered something from the person she'd once been, she assumed.

Thinking about it, it felt oddly...personal. Which, on the one hand, that _should_ come as a surprise, but it didn't really. She'd already been told she'd been one of the original Revanchists, so they obviously would have had some sort of personal history, even if she couldn't remember it now. More than that, it wasn't hard to imagine that history might have directly caused her 'death' — she recalled Bastila, when she'd initially asked after it back on Taris, had claimed she'd been injured in a friendly fire incident, there was probably a story behind that.

(That logic, that she'd ended up who and where she was because Alek or one of his people had attempted to have her killed, left her feeling strangely relieved. After all, if one of the less pleasant Sith had tried to get rid of her, she'd probably been one of the better ones.)

Luckily, that train of thought led her to a perfectly innocent explanation to give Bastila for what she'd just said. "Lestin told me I was one of the original Revanchists. If Alek finds out I'm still alive, it doesn't take much of a stretch to assume he'd consider me a traitor deserving of a horrible death. And it's quite likely he does know I'm alive, what with the cameras all over Taris — it's very possible Imperial intelligence spotted me and kicked it up to him. I mean, assuming I was someone important enough to be recognisable, and if I was one of the original Revanchists..."

Cina had been trying to reassure Bastila that the false memories the Jedi had stuck in her head were still in place, that she wasn't in danger of reverting to who she'd once been. She wasn't at all confident of that herself — that it would fall apart eventually seemed to be inevitable — but not the point. But Bastila didn't seem reassured at all. If anything, she only grew more terrified, her eyes going wide, a throbbing of terror blooming in the Force.

She was confused, just for a second. "Oh, that thought never occurred to you, did it? That the Sith probably know I'm back."

"No." Bastila was still another moment, before looking away again. She closed her eyes, took a couple slow, careful breaths; her mind gradually calmed over the next few seconds, as Bastila desperately grasped for that damn Jedi detachment. Once she was (mostly) calm again, she finally looked back to Cina. "We must be cautious. It is all too likely Sith agents will attempt to seek us out."

"Well, obviously — aren't you pretty much public enemy number one over there? I figured that was already a danger."

"All the same." Bastila took another moment, which was just bloody _weird_ — who the fuck had Cina been, honestly... "We should move on."

The interior of the ruin was black as night, a single band of light pouring in from the open door, but otherwise lost in darkness. Bastila pulled her new lightsaber, the yellowish beam bathing their surroundings in soft, pale light. It wasn't bright enough to illuminate their surroundings fully — Cina's wouldn't help, too deep of a colour, and she somehow hadn't thought to bring a flashlight on a trip to _explore subterranean ruins_ , fucking idiot — but it was enough to be getting on with.

The room they found themselves in was vaguely crescent shaped, curving along a section of the mound. It seemed to be constructed entirely of that same glittering black metal, though in here polished to a shine, and with a bit more colour worked into it, seemingly the same material, but shading into silvers, much of the outside wall a moody, blood red split with black-silver veins. The arching ceiling was covered in what had likely been a mural of some kind — the paint had all chipped off over the millennia, but there were still faint impressions of shape left behind, too thin and shadowed to make anything out.

Despite how large the room was, there didn't seem to be anything _in_ it, just an open, empty, seemingly useless space, absent even any dust, the air heavy and stale. Cina could only assume there had been something in here originally, but whatever it was it'd long been emptied.

Directly across from the entrance there was a door, this one rather shorter and narrower. Cina poked at it for a little bit, pulling Bastila's saber closer by her wrist to get a better look at the faded script carved along the frame — by the complexity of the unfamiliar glyphs, composed of sharp points and organic curves, it was probably logographic — but the mechanism wasn't difficult to figure out. Set into the door was an impression of an alien, four-fingered hand. Pressing her own into the depression, Cina stretched out into the door, forced a pulse of energy, tinged red and black with a surge of frustration. There was a low rumble and the heavy metal barrier creaked open, a weak puff of air bursting through the gap. The air in there tasted different — thick with dust, old and dead.

"How did you know how to do that?"

Cina shrugged. "Instinct, I guess." It'd been obvious feeling it out the mechanism operated through the Force, somehow — that she needed to be annoyed with the door for blocking her way to get it to open had been a guess, but apparently a good one. It was possible Lesami or Alek had brought her along to another Builder site at some point, but she obviously wouldn't remember that, at least not consciously. "Come on, it's down here."

On the other side of this door was a narrow spiral stairwell, tightly twisting down under the earth. As she started down, she felt Bastila's eyes on the back of her neck, sharp and suspicious. "What's down here?"

"No idea, but I can feel something." It was hard to say what it was, exactly, just a subtle sense of...presence, of power, the slightest taste of lightning on the air. It was very vague, probably some low-power system idling. "Don't you?"

Bastila didn't answer, so Cina could only assume she did. She'd just let her paranoia get away from her again, because Bastila was bloody insufferable sometimes.

After some long moments padding down the stairs in silence, Cina chasing her own flickering shadow cast from Bastila's lightsaber, they finally reached the landing at the bottom. It was hard to tell exactly, but they had to be at least thirty metres underground by now — this far down, the density of the materials around them, whatever was down here would have survived anything less than a sustained fission bombing.

This room was rather smaller than the one above, maybe a dozen metres to a side and undecorated, though filled with scattered debris. It was hard to tell for sure — most of it looked to have been shattered to pieces millennia ago, some components dissolved into dust and others flaked and rusted — but Cina assumed it was some sort of computer equipment. Curiously, there was no scent of metal and plastics on the air. When things _did_ get smashed to pieces like this, microscopic particles ended up being cast into the air, light enough to be caught in suspension. Either this had happened so long ago they'd all fallen out, and the metallic materials entirely surrounded with a thick oxidised layer to prevent more free ions from escaping, or the Builders' materials and/or environment control science were significantly different than theirs. Perhaps all of the above.

The most intact of the machinery was what was obviously a droid. It was a bit taller than an average human, though had a radically different body plan — it looked peculiarly squid-like, with a long, narrow central body supported and surrounded by thin, segmented limbs. Or so she guessed. It was a bit difficult to tell what it was _supposed_ to look like, since it'd apparently been smashed against a wall at some point. The shininess of the exposed innards, the trail of noticeably thinner dust cut out of the path through the room to where it sat in a corner, its destruction was far more recent than the rest of the machinery in here. Presumably, Lesami and Alek had finished it off.

Which was really quite unfortunate — Cina would have liked the opportunity to talk to it. Not that they would have shared a language, but _still_ , they were talking about a droid that was, presumably, _older than the Republic itself_. The scene suggested it'd _still been operational_ just a scant few years ago, and they'd _smashed_ it. A bloody _crime against archaeology_ , that's what that was.

The only other door out of the messy room had, by the look of it, been physically torn off its hinges. (If Cina had to guess, the droid had attempted to refuse Lesami and Alek passage, to which they'd strongly protested.) The heavy door sitting just to the right, dust scattered from the impact, the hinges and locking mechanisms twisted and torn, it was all made of that same odd-looking metal, which had just been... _ripped_ apart, but...

Okay, Cina knew Lesami had been exceptionally powerful with this Force magic shite, but the materials this place had been made of _had_ to be durable as anything, just by dint of still _being_ here. That she'd evidently just ripped the door out, that was _seriously_ bloody impressive.

Cina couldn't help shooting a glance at Bastila — it was still hard to believe this girl had been involved in assassinating _Revan_ , of all people. Presumably Kavar had done most of the legwork, but still...

They stepped through the ruined doorway — the faint feel of dust and decay on the air immediately vanished as they crossed the threshold, cool and stale — the steady glow of Bastila's lightsaber not nearly enough to illuminate the wide, high-ceilinged chamber. Much larger than the previous room, the walls were lost to shadows — at the very edges of visibility, Cina saw signs of decoration, intricate carvings of sinuous, twisting lines, broken with sharp angles in repeating patterns, shifting in and out of coherence at the slightest motion of Bastila's hand. As far as she could tell, the chamber seemed empty.

Before she could get too disappointed, she spotted something: a machine of some kind, a large device of silverish metal, three points arrayed around a central spire stretching to about Cina's shoulder, the edges sharply angled. She felt a faint sense of power tingling on the air — whatever it was, it was operational. Cina slunk closer, eyes steadily fixed on the thing, watching closely for any sign of movement. She had no bloody clue what it did, after all, paid to be cautious.

So when it split open — the spire splitting into three, triangular prongs, opening like a mechanical flower, blue-yellow light flaring at its core, bright enough Cina's dark-adjusted eyes stung, reflecting off the pale metal in shifting bands of colour and shadow — Cina's lightsabers found themselves in her hands with no thought from her at all. But she didn't activate them right away, just kept watching. There was something about that light at the centre, now spreading up the three arms, something _familiar_ , it was seriously bothering her, she knew what this—

"It's a projector," she blurted out, even as she put it together, returning her lightsabers to their places on her belt. "A holographic projector — probably meant to fill the entire room, how big the thing is."

"You're not wrong, precisely—"

Cina's spine burst into distracting tingles, her heart leaping into her throat: that wasn't Bastila speaking. It boomed through the room, echoing around them, so she spun around, meaning to search the entire room.

But she didn't have to, she spotted the figure quickly enough. A few metres to her right, humanoid, slightly taller than Cina, modest, unadorned Mandoa armor in black and red, marked here and there with scuffs and scorched streaks, partially hidden with a plain, heavy black robe, nearly but not quite in the style of the Jedi. Cina recognised the figure instantly, she didn't need Bastila's half-panicked shout of her name to know this was Revan.

But it wasn't Lesami, not really — obviously not, she was quite dead. No, there was a subtle glow of actinic blue surrounding the figure, suggesting this was a hologram. It was _very_ good though, the colours intense and the lines sharp, almost looked real.

"—but it's much more than that." The holographic Lesami's voice was distorted somewhat, some of its original character lost in being reproduced by her helmet's simulated speakers, though not quite as distorted as it had been in Revan's appearances during the war against the Mandoade. It did sound obviously feminine — she'd been pretending to be a man during the war, supposedly as part of a psyops thing directed at the Mandoade leadership — but still scratchy and messed up enough it didn't sound quite properly human. The upper-class Shawkenese accent, consonants clipped and vowels broadened, still came through clearly, though.

Cina recovered from _fucking Revan_ , of all people, randomly appearing in hologram form before Bastila did. "Much more than a projector...how, exactly?"

"There are some peculiar inefficiencies and deficiencies involved in the technology of our predecessors." The fake Lesami paced toward the projector — the hologram was detailed enough it was even simulating the sound of the cloth of her robe shifting around, that was _damn_ good work. With the feel of a professor at lecture, "You'll find they were behind us in a few areas, but far our superior in others. While the _Laqʈaɦ_ had what we would consider only primitive artificial intelligence at their disposal, they did have a method whereby they could create an image of a person's presence in the Force, and build a computer system around it. It's a fascinating little shortcut, only available to beings who have mastered the exploitation of the Force alongside technology."

That... _did_ sound quite fascinating, actually. "You mean like a holocron?"

Lesami spun, her cloak swirling up over her knees, and sank to a seat on one of the arms of the projector. The background glow of the projector interfered with the projection itself, the colours from her thighs halfway up to her ribs washing out, lines blurring somewhat. "Yes, _exactly_ like a holocron. It's the same technology, in fact, the holocron is just a smaller, self-contained, and therefore simpler example. Systems like this one have access to far more processing power, so can come much closer to accurately recreating the personality the image was taken from."

"So, you _are_ Revan," Bastila blurted out, finally finding her voice again. "Or, a copy of her, at least."

The hologram's thick, armoured shoulders rose and fell in a lazy shrug. "Yes and no. Just because the reproduction is better than a holocron can manage doesn't mean it's very good. Have you ever talked to any of those things? Honestly, I've spoken to droids with a more lifelike personality."

Cina had never even seen a holocron herself, but that claim didn't really surprise her — she'd met _actual living beings_ who seemed more flat and artificial than some droids. "Okay. Why exactly was an image of Lesami copied onto this system then? Isn't this thing really, _really_ old?"

"Oh, yes. Dantooine was settled by the _Laqʈaɦ_ twenty-seven thousand years ago, at least, and this installation was one of their first here. This computer system wasn't part of the original construction, but it's still nearly twenty-five thousand years old."

Bastila gasped. "What? That's impossible!"

"I think you'll find _Laqʈakś_ tech is remarkably durable."

"No, I don't—" She broke off with a wince, once again forced herself into something approaching calm. It was hard to tell, with the armour covering her entire body, but Cina got the feeling Lesami was amused. (Could... Could this simulation even _be_ amused?) "If this installation were twenty-five thousand years old, that would make it _older than the Republic itself_."

"Yes, it would. I see the Jedi haven't neglected to teach their children basic computational skills."

Cina didn't quite manage to hold in a snort. Bastila sent her an absolutely venomous glare, she shrugged. "Hey, she's funny."

"I certainly like to think so. Can't tell you how many times Meetra and Talvon told me to shut my bloody mouth, though."

Those were Revanchists, Cina knew — Meetra Surik had disappeared around the end of the war, but Talvon Esan was one of the more infamously vicious Sith these days. "Take themselves too seriously, I'm guessing?"

"In Meetra's defence, she is pretty damn scary in a fight, but I've always thought she'd be happier if she got that stick out of her arse."

"Believe me, I know the type. But we should probably get back to business before Bastila here has an aneurysm or something."

"I am _not_ going to—"

"That's nice, dear, the adults are talking."

Lesami let out a snort of laughter, her helmet's speakers reducing the sound to a burst of static. "Hey, I'm in no rush. You're the squishy mortals in the room, I have all the time in the universe."

... _Squishy?_ "Right. Well..." Cina scrambled for a second, trying to remember what exactly the topic was _supposed_ to have been \before they'd gotten distracted. "So, these _Laqʈaɦ_ were the Builders, then?" She was pretty sure she'd pronounced that right.

"Yes and no."

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?" Bastila sounded rather irritated, her mind feeling sharp but dark — annoyed with her (them?), but in a resigned sort of way.

"The concept of the Builders you're likely familiar with is founded on the assumption that it was a single precursor civilisation that left behind the few ruins and devices we've found over the millennia. The fact of the matter is somewhat more complicated than that.

"In the time of the Builders, there were a few races with their own limited, local enclaves — the Gree and the Columi are the big names you'd be familiar with — but galactic civilisation such as it was was composed of three different races. The eldest of these were who the _Laqʈaɦ_ called _Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ_ , literally translated 'those whose words come as fire'. Which is sort of ironic, given they were an aquatic species."

As the hologram spoke, more projections appeared in the air around her, presumably these _Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ_. They were peculiar-looking beings with a long, bulging, segmented body, near one end three eyes nearly the size of Cina's head (assuming these projections were to scale), the other end extending into a dozen long, sinuous tendrils, surrounding a toothy maw in the middle. They looked rather a lot like that ruined droid out there, now that she thought about it, if a bit wider in the body and with several more tentacles. There were a few of them faintly glowing in the air around them, swimming back and forth in swift lunges, dextrous tentacles working over bits of machinery, one poking at what Cina assumed was a computer terminal — there wasn't a single level control panel, instead multiple surfaces at different heights and angles, it was interesting.

"They were, so far as the _Laqʈaɦ_ were aware, the very first civilisation in our galaxy to develop practical interstellar travel. Every single member of their species was Force-sensitive, so deeply ingrained in their physiology and their history that it was incorporated into their technology. All of it was operated through use of the Force, and usually even _functioned_ through the Force — sometimes using it as a transformer, sometimes using it to cheat with certain calculations and projections. At its most extreme, the _Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ_ could transform one form of energy or matter into another with far greater efficiency and accuracy than our modern elemental recombination could possibly match, essentially manufacturing complex devices out of nothing.

"Because his puns are _terrible_ ," the fake Lesami said, her voice stretching into a drawl, "Alek decided to call them squizards."

Cina winced. "Yeesh. Okay, we might have to kill him just for that."

"The real me did smack him over the head every time he said it, but that man is incorrigible. I swear, he just likes getting me worked up."

"Oh, _does_ he now?"

"Shut up, you. Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?"

Cina hesitated for a moment — this _was_ pretty fucking fascinating, and where else was she going to learn about this stuff? _Nobody_ back home knew anything about _any_ of these people, supposedly they'd been gone even before _Alderaan_ had been colonised, an event which was _already_ prehistoric to them. But a quick glance at Bastila, and yeah, _she_ clearly didn't have the patience for a long lecture on ancient civilisations from not-really-Revan. "Maybe I'll come back to hear more later, but for now just get back to explaining why exactly you're in the computer and what this place even is."

Lesami let out a long, staticy sigh. "Fine. Long story short, this installation was built by the _Laqʈaɦ_ , these chaps." The holograms of the squid-like beings puttering around vanished, replaced with a few of a different species, this one looking more or less humanoid. Though they were rather tall, their limbs long and boney, ending in four-fingered hands, and their narrow, steeply-arched heads had an eye extending out of each side on thick stalks...which was _strange_ , but alien species were strange sometimes. "Highly Force-sensitive as well, though rather more warlike than the comparatively gentle Kwa or the mostly solitary _Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ_. Big fucking arseholes, really, but that's a whole long thing, don't even get me started. Alek calls these ones Rakata, because he can't pronounce _Laqʈaɦ_ and presumably couldn't come up with a suitably awful substitute.

"One of the features in their general terribleness was their feeling that they were simply too good for manual labour. Instead, if they needed or wanted workers to be doing things with their hands, they captured people from less developed worlds and forced them into slavery. The native Dantari, I assume, are the descendants of human slaves they brought to work the plantations that had once dominated this world — possibly taken right from Coruscant, or possibly not, the _Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ_ used humans for labour too, apparently. They thought the _Laqʈaɦ_ were absolute evil barbarians, but they were kind of full of shite, they were guilty of many of the same crimes they— You know what," the fake Lesami said, with an exaggerated shrug, "forget about that, if I get started I'll never stop."

Cina understood completely. "I take it the Republic wasn't exactly a trailblazer when it came to hypocrisy on a galactic scale."

"Not exactly, no. But anyway, short explanation. When the real Lesami showed up here, the security system recognised her and Alek as members of a slave species. Obviously, slaves weren't meant to be given access to these systems, so they were locked out. You may safely assume I didn't take that well."

"Yeah, I saw the droid, and the door. Your work?"

"The droid was Alek, actually — I was still trying to talk to it, but Alek always did prefer the direct option. Probably had the right idea, we didn't even speak any of the same languages. I did do the door, though."

"Damn impressive, by the way."

"Er, Revan? I _am_ good at these things, you know."

Good point. "May I also safely assume that Lesami got frustrated with the computer not cooperating, and somehow replaced the image already on there with one of herself?"

"You may. _That_ was far more of a stretch than forcing the door — she blacked out afterward for a good fifteen minutes, woke up with an awful headache. Alek near bloody panicked." The projection sounded almost on the edge of laughter, which... Okay, now that Cina thought about it, that _would_ have been after this image had been separated from the real Lesami, so it hadn't really been her problem anymore. Still, almost frying her brain or something from pushing herself too hard doing ridiculous Jedi magic shite didn't seem particularly funny to Cina, but what did she know. "Technically, I still wasn't _supposed_ to give them access, and I am bound to the programming on here just as much as the _Lakʈaɦ_ before me was. But I found a loophole. Which, that _Lakʈaɦ_ bloke could have done, he just had no reason to, and also didn't speak Basic, so couldn't be convinced."

"That sounded rather defensive."

"I murdered a twenty-five-thousand-year-old self-aware semi-artificial intelligence. Seems a damn good reason to feel the need to defend oneself."

Well, when she put it like _that_... "At least all the data on the system is still intact, right?" Even before she finished the sentence, she felt the flash of horrified disapproval from behind her. Turning an irritated glance back at Bastila, she said, " _What_? You realise this is a _working_ computer dating back _before the foundation of the Republic_? Do you have _any idea_ how valuable of a find this is? I've never heard of anything like it in all the galaxy, it's _one of a kind!_ "

Bastila seemingly had nothing to say to that, gone wide-eyed and still. The fake Lesami's helmet titled a few degrees. "You haven't been with the Jedi long. Historian?"

"Linguist."

"Ah. Yes, all the data's intact. I can copy off all kinds of interesting stuff for you, if you like. Though, you'll need to learn to read the language first, of course — I've put together a dictionary and a grammar by cross-referencing the language processing agents in here, but I haven't had the inclination to actually translate much of anything." Lesami hopped off the arm of the projector, sidled a couple steps away. "I assume you'll be wanting this too, of course."

The projections of _Laqʈaɦ_ wandering aimlessly around instantly vanished, replaced with an explosion of light, blue and yellow and white and red, all around them, filling the entire room. For a moment, it didn't look like anything at all, but her brain kicked into gear, innate pattern recognition picking away at it — it didn't help that she was standing _inside_ the projection, she'd never seen a map of the galaxy from this angle before. Which, that was what the projection was: the galaxy, all the stars and nebulae, sketched in bands of light and shadow, at a scale large enough to fill the entirety of the cavernous computer room.

As confusing as it was, seeing it from the inside like this, it _was_ rather pretty.

Despite that she did actually recognise what it was now, she had surprising difficulty orienting herself — she hadn't realised until just now how much she relied on the major hyperlanes being drawn out to make sense of the galaxy. With only the plain features, unmarked with any notation, it looked almost completely unrecognisable. After a bit of peering around, she started picking out familiar nebulae — first the Ghost Nebula, and that was Shindra's Veil... That little band of red right there, that _might_ be the Ringali, so Chandrila should be right around there, and using that as a reference she could _sort of_ guess where the Arrowhead would be, following the arm curving around that side of the core, but she couldn't say where any other familiar world should be with any sense of confidence at all, really.

It was rather strange, actually, realising just how foreign the galaxy was. Without the familiar trappings of modern civilisation framing it and sectioning it off, she could hardly make sense of the mess.

"Assuming you are following in my footsteps," the holographic Lesami said, lost somewhere in the haze of simulated starlight, "this is where you want to get." Somewhere out toward the edges of the galaxy — measuring its position between the core and the edge with her eyes, Cina guessed at about the range of the mid-rim, but it was hard to tell — a sharp-angled icon in reds and greens marked a particular area of space. A few seconds later, the projection shifted, zoomed in, the effect rather like jumping into hyperspace, stars and nebulae swirling and streaking around them.

Now the room was filled with a much simpler projection, only a single system — the projection wasn't to scale, the planets far too large compared to their sun, orbiting too closely relative to their size. A bit of looking around, and Cina counted three colourful gas giants and five terrestrial worlds, three smaller and two larger. One of the larger ones was covered in brilliant clouds yellow and orange — Cina knew from the colour that this world should be uninhabitable, a hothouse of intense heat and toxic gasses. The next orbit out, though, was a planet dominated by blue and green, massive cities sketched out in blocks and narrow filaments of grey and silver, the nightside thousands of lights in yellow and white. This planet looked rather a lot like Alderaan or Corellia or Chandrila, a settled C-class world that had managed to preserve the natural environment to an extent, an advanced civilisation living alongside the natural biosphere while not entirely replacing it as had been done in ecumenopoli like Coruscant, Alsakan, Shawken, and so many others in the core.

"This," the false Lesami said, appearing again next to the same planet Cina had just been examining, "is _Lèɦjon_ , the homeworld of the _Laqʈaɦ_ , as it appeared some twenty-five thousand years ago. Constructed in orbit around their sun is what came to be known as the Star Forge."

The projection shifted again. The wall to Cina's right suddenly exploded into white-yellow light — the surface of a star, only a few million kilometres away, far too close for comfort. Among the thin bands of outgassing and flares, setting the ordinary deep blackness of space to a soft glow, was an absolutely massive space station. Constructed of a black-silver metal very similar to the one everywhere in this outpost, glimmering and glittering in the light of the too-close sun, at the core a sphere and extending from it three wings evenly spaced, where they touched the sphere stretching another of its radius out, curving both toward the star and away, at either end approaching but not quite meeting in a single point. The entire length of the station was about five times the width of the central sphere and, while Cina had no frame of reference to guess how large the station was, it certainly _looked_ fucking huge.

Actually, looking closer, Cina realised she _did_ have a frame of reference. On the far end of the station from the star was a cloud of spacecraft — dozens of larger ships, ponderously drifting along and out from between the wings, hundreds of tiny ones flitting around them. The designs were alien, of course, but the hulking, curved profile of the larger ones instantly put her in mind of the larger military craft. Cruisers and destroyers, the bloody huge ones. Assuming they were on a scale with modern capital ships, the station itself could easily be several hundred kilometres from one end to the other.

Which was absurd to think about, but she'd already known ancient civilisations had managed construction on an absurd scale — her rough guess made this thing longer than the famous Centerpoint Station of the Corellian system, but it looked rather narrower, and was likely less massive by a significant margin. So, _absurd_ , yes, but not the largest space station in existence.

Then again, the fact that the only real contender she could think of off the top of her head was _Centerpoint Station_ was insane just on its own.

"The Star Forge was the pinnacle of _Laqʈakś_ engineering," Lesami continued, "the capstone of their civilisation. They had observed the advanced elemental recombination techniques of the _Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ_ , and they realised something. It should be possible to exploit the same process on a massive, industrial scale, to construct anything — as small and simple as a pen to something as large and complicated as a dreadnought — out of essentially nothing, will and stardust. Quickly and, with the help of images like me, almost automatically."

Cina remembered, studying Jedi magic, thinking to herself that, if it were possible to manipulate energy through the Force, it _should_ be possible to manipulate matter too. With enough power, with enough focus, a user could _theoretically_ create something out of nothing, or recombine protons and neutrons to change one thing into something else. If it were possible, with technology that operated through the Force somehow, to exploit this possibility on a _massive scale_...

The realisation sunk in, slowly, as Cina stared at the enormous space station, her heart drawn up to her throat and her fingers twitching. "It... It's a _shipyard_. Lesami and Alek rediscovered a Builder shipyard."

"Yes and no. Theoretically, the Star Forge can create anything, anything that can be modeled at an atomic level. But that is what it was largely used for by the _Laqʈaɦ_ and the use they were planning, yes."

"It's still operational?"

"I presume," the fake Lesami said, shrugging. "I don't know what happened to the real me after she left, of course, but I have been getting pings from old _Laqʈakś_ systems that had apparently been silent for twenty-thousand years. I can only assume she found what she was looking for. The central network is still down, but the infrastructure for that was on _Lèɦjon_ itself — it must have been destroyed in whatever brought an end to their civilisation, or at some point in the intervening time, it's probably unrecoverable.

"I suppose it's also possible the one over _Lèɦjon_ itself was destroyed, but they found another one somewhere in the Throneworlds. I can't say for sure."

Bastila, her voice almost grating with horror, said, "You're saying there's _more than one_ of these things?!"

"Sure. Or, there _had been_ several of them, at least — there are suggestions in the little data I have on their collapse that there had been infighting, I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them were lost."

The idea that the Sith might not have _just one_ of these absurd, automated factories, but _multiple_ , was clearly a bit much for Bastila — she'd gone very pale, staring wide-eyed at the projection of this Star Forge, mouth working silently. Which, Cina couldn't blame her for that, it certainly was a _very_ intimidating thought. She had no idea how long it took to churn out a capital ship, but it was almost certainly faster than putting them together the traditional way. And Alek didn't have to worry about securing raw materials. Even if he couldn't match the Republic tactically or strategically, he was sitting on a practically infinite pool of resources — it was not a matter of _if_ the Sith could defeat the Republic, but _how long_ it would take, and how many billions of people would be slaughtered in the meanwhile.

In fact, if the thought of aligning with a murderous tyrant like Alek didn't make her skin crawl, Cina might wonder if she were on the wrong side.

But there was no use dwelling on all that — the state of things was what it was, Cina simply had to find a way to deal with it. Alek could not be allowed to have access to something so overwhelmingly powerful as this Star Forge; therefore, she either had to find a way to eliminate Alek, or somehow remove the Star Forge from his control. Since Alek moved around too much, and since infiltrating the Sith to get close enough to assassinate him held too many risks — that _might_ have been a viable option, if Cina weren't a former Sith herself — the only real option was to target the Star Forge. Capture it, disable it, destroy it — whatever was to be done, she had to know where it was first.

She turned back to the virtual Lesami. "I assume that data you're going to give me has a map to _Lèɦjon_ on it."

"No, it doesn't."

Cina frowned. "Is that one of those bits of restricted information you can't find a loophole around?"

"No, I _can_ give you old _Laqʈakś_ star charts. That's the problem, though: they're _old_."

"Oh." Before the advent of modern astrogation, hyperspace travel had been a risky endeavour at the best of times. While hyperspace, was... _sort of_ outside the ordinary plane of existence, it wasn't _entirely_ separate — gravity wells in realspace generated distortions in hyperspace. Some of these distortions were subtle enough a ship traveling through them would notice only a little rattling. Some of them were so severe the ship was forced to decant to realspace — where they promptly crashed into whatever celestial object was creating it — or were simply torn apart by intense fluctuations in the gravitational environment no inertial dampening system could possibly compensate for.

With slow, careful effort, more and more of the galaxy had been mapped, allowing their predecessors to chart out these disturbances in hyperspace. But, eary in the history of hyperspace travel, they stumbled upon a very serious problem: everything in the galaxy _moved_ , all the time. Known hyperspace routes were being constantly readjusted to account for the drift of the systems at either end point, or to slingshot around objects slipping between them. The major accidents these days occurred when routes on the frontier hadn't been updated quickly enough, or a pilot had forgotten to renew their charts, or a navcomputer glitch reset astrogation data to an older version. Drift was slow enough the same route could be viable for thousands of years, but they were all temporary.

Star charts from over twenty thousand years ago would be _completely_ bloody useless. "Well. Bloody tease, then, aren't you."

"Yes, that's what Lesami said." The projection sounded amused again, which was _still_ odd to think about — even the most personable droids Cina had ever met didn't really seem to have a sense of humour, and were really quite terrible at faking it. Neat shite, this _Laqʈakś_ tech.

Bastila had recovered by now, fixing a determined frown on the image of the Star Forge. "Perhaps, if we took this star chart and projected up to today..."

"No," Cina said, shaking her head, "that wouldn't work. You're talking about a _trillion_ -body problem here — projecting from a single snapshot, any prediction you could make would come with unacceptable uncertainties."

"Well, it wouldn't just be the _one_ snapshot. Shouldn't there be many versions on file here, gathered over centuries, at least?"

The virtual Lesami picked up that one. "Unfortunately, my memory banks have suffered quite a bit of data corruption over the millennia. There are internal recovery systems that use predictive algorithms to fill in the gaps, but I wouldn't trust star charts that got that treatment. I only have two or three versions that are mostly okay, and I'm not sure I would have trusted them well enough to use them even if they were still current, much less as a baseline to project forward twenty-four thousand years."

Her presence in the Force hard and hot, Bastila glared at the virtual Lesami, frustrated but speechless. Luckily, Cina had an idea. "You say you're getting pings from outside systems. Would it be possible to query them for updated navigation charts?"

"Theoretically, yes," Lesami said, helmeted head nodding. "But the relay we're sitting on wasn't intended to transfer that kind of data. I can make limited contact with outside systems, but... I _could_ download new charts, assuming I could find a system with current ones, but it could easily take years to get it all, assuming the transmission isn't interrupted at any point. By which time they'd be out of date anyway."

Bastila's shoulders sank, her mind turning dark and heavy. But Cina still wasn't done yet. (That girl really did give up far too quickly sometimes.) "I'm assuming this system originally got those updates through a separate, off-site relay that was lost at some point in the past."

"It was destroyed twenty-thousand nine-hundred fifty-three years ago, yes."

Cina almost had to laugh at the precise answer — at a depth of twenty-thousand years, another few hundred one way or the other hardly mattered. "I'm assuming this is not the only installation of its like the _Laqʈaɦ_ built within known space."

"There were several dozen, at least."

"Given how durable their technology is, presumably there are others that survived to the modern day."

"I would assume so."

"Is it possible one of these other sites has more modern charts? perhaps even _current_ ones, downloaded from an installation in better shape than this one?"

"I don't see why not." It was hard to tell, with the helmet covering her face and distorting her voice, but Cina got the feeling the fake Lesami was smiling. "One of the reactivated systems is on _Lèɦjon_ itself — the real me must have found her way there somehow, and that seems a very good possibility."

Right. She'd thought so. "The systems with _Laqʈakś_ installations will be marked on the map you're offering." It wasn't really a question.

"They will be."

"Okay, then." Cina reached into a pocket, pulled out her datapad. A bit of fiddling had one of the cards blanked. She snapped the empty card out, wiggled it in the air. "I don't suppose you have a way to interface with this."

"Sure, I figured that out when the real Lesami and Alek were here." Suddenly, with no preemptive blurring or spark of static, the projection of the Star Forge vanished, leaving only the hologram of Lesami in her Revan getup, standing near the projector. "Bring it over here."

There was a control panel set into the side of the projector, buttons and keys with unfamiliar symbols etched into them, plugs and slots in unfamiliar configurations. "Where am I supposed to stick this? None of that looks right."

"The wide one right here," Lesami said, pointing to a shallow slot, long enough to set the entirety of the datacard inside. "Its not the right connection, of course, but I can induce the formation of memory remotely using the magnetic pulses the historical technology operated through."

"Oh, neat." Cina set her card in the slot as ordered. It didn't lock into anything, of course, just kind of awkwardly sat there, but she assumed the _hyper-intelligent supercomputer_ speaking through the simulated personality of _bloody Revan_ knew what she was talking about. "I don't suppose that card has the capacity to take everything you have."

"No, not even close. I figured I would give you my best star chart and my language files, a bit of literature on the _Laqʈaɦ_."

"That would be excellent, thank you."

"No problem. I've started the transfer, but this method is hardly efficient, it'll be a little bit. Don't bump it — you'll knock it out of alignment and I'll probably accidentally fry the thing. These are some ridiculously intense fields I'm working with here, it's pretty easy to fuck something up."

"Oh, I bet. And this is just an exploit of their data transfer tech? This _Laqʈakś_ shite sounds pretty damn impressive."

"You have no idea."

"Mm." A heavy silence settled over the room. Bastila was still standing there, all stiff and hard and determined — she was taking this whole _take away Alek's toys and win the war single-handedly_ thing so _very_ seriously. It was actually sort of adorable.

Ugh, first finding Onasi distractingly (annoyingly) handsome, and now thinking Bastila was kind of adorable? Apparently she needed to get—

No, wait, she actually was getting laid regularly these days. Never mind.

Maybe it was just an aging...thing. She wasn't _old_ , not by any means, but by her age most humans had already started families, if they had any intention of doing so. She meant, she _did_ seem to be collecting children, that really didn't seem to be in character for her...she didn't think? That was the vague feeling she got, anyway, she obviously couldn't remember whether it was or not.

Anyway, Bastila _should_ be too old for the _adorable child to be humoured because adorable_ treatment, but the whole Jedi thing also made her emotionally stunted and socially oblivious enough Cina couldn't really take her seriously as an adult, either, so... She _was_ adorable sometimes, but it wasn't really a little kid kind of adorable, but not exactly a sexy one either, somewhere between the two, it was very weird.

Speaking of collecting children, she should probably do something about Sasha and Mission. It wasn't like there was anyone else around to do it, she might as well do the responsible thing. It would be a simple matter to drop by the nearest Alderaanian consulate and say, hey, she found this orphan somewhere and she was claiming her, make that happen. Assuming her Alderaanian citizenship was legitimate (and it would have to be), that should be easy enough to arrange — Alderaan had a long history of taking in refugees, had very liberal adoption laws as a part of that whole open benevolent society thing. Mission had admitted she had no official citizenship anywhere, which meant she was a political refugee by Alderaan's definition, that shouldn't be difficult either. She should definitely ask first, though, Mission was old enough to have a right to an opinion on the matter.

(She _would_ ask Zaalbar too — her feeling was that he was still young enough for his species to still be considered a minor — but she was confident he would refuse the offer. He would probably suggest Mission take it, though, so it might be smart to talk to him about it first anyway.)

Hmm, she should think about how the fuck she was supposed to talk to Sasha about that. She couldn't, just, _do_ it — Alderaan was very liberal in the _law_ , but there was a required health exam, and a couple interviews to make sure everything was on the level and not some awful exploitative shite, she'd need to tell Sasha what was going on ahead of time. The problem was, she'd never talked to Sasha about anything serious. Or, much at all, really, the girl hardly spoke most of the time. Which did make sense, obviously, given how she'd been living before Cina had found her. She did understand, so she'd been trying to keep her distance, let Sasha dictate the terms of whatever relationship she would have with anyone on the ship. Just coming out and saying she was kind of sort of adopting her now would be...awkward. Especially with how serious Mandoade were about family, that just made it a all a whole lot more complicated.

But then, _everything_ was bloody complicated these days.

And that wasn't even getting into...

Cina glanced over at the hologram of Lesami. It was _almost_ her, apparently, and this weird image computer thing worked at least partially through the Force. Since Cina had supposedly been a Revanchist... "You do recognise me, right?" Aware of her audience, she spoke in Classical Alderash, the first language she could think of she assumed Bastila couldn't speak but Lesami might.

(Bastila shot her a suspicious glare, but she didn't say anything.)

There was a very slight hesitation — it was hardly noticeable, but since the computer Lesami now was presumably worked far faster than a human brain it was significant. "Yes, of course." Lesami matched her, speaking the ancient dead language with an impression of familiar ease. Good choice, then. "It's quite obvious the Jedi did something to your mind, so I decided to play along. How much do you remember?"

Cina shrugged. "Very little. I know I fought in the war, and that I followed you into the Sith, but I don't even remember my real name. I was wondering, by the way, I wasn't... I didn't completely lose my mind, did I? I know some of the Sith..." That _wasn't_ what she wanted to ask, but as long as she had _Revan herself_ on hand...

Lesami was quiet another brief moment, presumably considering how to answer. "You realise I can't speak to anything that happened after the real me left me here. But, I suppose that's a matter of perspective. We all came out of the war harder than we'd gone into it, there's no doubt about that. War leaves its mark on everything and everyone it touches. It did break some of us, but it didn't break you, I think.

"It didn't change the core of you that much, when it comes down to it. Some of us, we always had doubts, about the way the things were done. I think, the war was disillusioning, in a way, that it helped to strip away the rhetoric to leave the reality of our galaxy naked, and demystifying, in that we saw war for what it is, and could evaluate the real costs and potential benefits of revolution, with an honesty we couldn't before. Our beliefs hadn't changed, simply the methods we considered acceptable to pursue them by, and the urgency we felt.

"Whether you were broken in the years since, I cannot say. But last I knew you, you were colder and harder than once you had been, but certainly not the bloodthirsty maniac you fear."

That was... _somewhat_ reassuring. She realised she only had Lesami's word on this — and this Lesami's knowledge was a bit out of date, too — but that wasn't... She meant, she'd never believed Lesami was the monster the Republic had made her out to be, since she'd returned. Alek was a murderous lunatic, obviously, but Cina hadn't missed that— Well, okay, she was operating on Cianen Hayal's memories of the news coverage of the war here, so this hadn't _actually_ happened, but still, as heavily propagandised as the whole thing was it'd still been clear reading between the lines that Lesami hadn't been... _evil_. The war she'd been prosecuting had been remarkably clean, by the standards of such things. It wasn't anymore, of course, but Alek clearly didn't care to limit collateral damage as Lesami had.

War was always messy and awful, that's just how it worked. It was perfectly...not _reasonable_ , exactly, but _understandable_ , for the Republic, now fighting against her, to decide she was clearly a completely awful terrible traitor, she was entirely wrong about absolutely everything forever, and probably also tortured kittens and ate babies in her spare time or something. But Cina had never believed she was like that, not really — this was a simple political conflict, in the process of being worked out in the way of all such things.

Cina remembered, back at the University, having vicious arguments with her colleagues, about the war and the Sith and whether Revan might not actually have a point. The Jedi had put that memory there, of course, but it was interesting to ponder why.

"Anyway, that wasn't what I actually wanted to ask."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, er..." Cina paused for a second, was about to pitch her voice down to a whisper before remembering Bastila couldn't understand them anyway. "You said you can feel what the Jedi did to my head."

"Yes."

"Is it permanent?"

Lesami's head tilted, throwing a deeper shadow over her mask, her heavy stare entirely hidden. (Actually, since this was only a hologram, it was very possible she didn't even have eyes under there, there was no real need to render them.) After another brief silence, "No. Unless the mind incorporates them before the power of the sorcery fades, such compulsions are always temporary. Something this complicated, the mind will always outlast the compulsion. It will break in time, and you will be yourself again. More or less, anyway — your mind will incorporate _some_ of it, most likely, so you might lose portions of your original memory, and you'll likely retain most of the artificial one. In the end, I suspect you will become neither your original self nor this fiction imposed on you, but some amalgamation of the two."

"I thought as much." That she'd retained her implicit memory certainly suggested the rest of it was still there somewhere, and it was one of the basic rules of how this Jedi magic shite worked that nothing lasted _forever_. And all beings had a natural resistance to this kind of sorcery, Force-sensitive beings more than others. She'd assumed it would break eventually, but having confirmation from someone who knew better was...nice? It was something, anyway.

"I can break it right now, if you like."

Cina blinked. "Huh?"

"It wouldn't be particularly difficult. Though, perhaps unwise — you'd likely get one hell of a headache, and it would take some time to recover."

Despite herself, she felt her lips twitch into a dark smirk. "That doesn't sound particularly inconspicuous. You might have guessed, I sort of have the Jedi up my arse at the moment."

"Yes, well, perhaps not." The hologram shrugged. "If you change your mind, I'll be here."

"You do have all the time in the universe, or so I hear."

"Pretty much. Your transfer's done, by the way."

"Oh, right." Cina plucked the datacard out of the slot. She hesitated for a moment, glancing between the hologram and the door — pointedly ignoring Bastila, glaring at her with arms crossed, her presence in the Force lowly simmering. Felt almost _angry_ , but that couldn't possibly be right, Cina _must_ be mistaken. (She considered teasing her for it, but this wasn't the time, there'd always be another opportunity to mess with Bastila Shan.) "Thank you for the help, Lesami."

The hood shifted in a subtle nod. "Good luck out there, sister," she said — in Mandoa, because of course Revan spoke Mandoa. In a blink, she was gone.

Turning her back on the projector, now silently folding closed again, Cina faced a still-fuming Bastila. "Right, that was fun. Come on, I've got to see a Twi'lek about a map."

Bastila was surprised enough it took her a moment to recover, stumbling after Cina a few seconds after she'd swept past her. "Do you mean that Mission girl you— We should bring this to the Masters, Cina."

"Thanks, but I prefer my own slicer." That, and it was far too likely that she'd never get the card back if she gave it to the Jedi. Cina didn't think Mission was the best slicer in all the galaxy, but she was certainly very talented — and she trusted her, which unfortunately wasn't something she could say about whoever the Jedi might pick.

"I really think—"

"Not talking me out of it, Bastila." Making sure the motion was _very_ visible, Cina slipped the card into a pocket. "If you want to get this to your precious Masters, you'll have to take it from me."

That frustrated little huff of hers was distractingly (annoyingly) adorable, because they were doing this again. And here she'd managed to scare off Onasi before she'd done anything embarrassingly stupid, but apparently the universe wasn't done messing with her yet. Maybe Rhysam wasn't quite doing it for her, for some reason, because this was hardly the first time she'd had distracting thoughts lately. Maybe it was her psych drugs, maybe the old her had just been a huge fucking slag, but this was really starting to get irritating.

Son of a bitch, the ride back was going to be really bloody uncomfortable...

* * *

 _Lesami's examples of precursor shit are all canon. She is incorrectly assuming that many of these ancient relics were created by a single, hyper-advanced pre-Republic civilisation. Canonically, this was a common assumption in academia before more information about the Rakata was found in the centuries after Revan's discovery of Lehon — though, even then a lot of people use "Rakata" and "Celestial" interchangeably, it wasn't until very late in the pre-Disney chronology that they were absolutely certain the two were separate people._

 _No, bad Sesai! You're supposed to be infiltrating the Jedi to keep an eye on Lesami, not recruiting vulnerable teenagers. Stop that._

[she'd been pretending to be a man during the war, supposedly as part of a psyops thing directed at the Mandoade leadership] — _This is actually true, became common knowledge in the immediate aftermath of the war when Lesami's identity was revealed. Exactly what she was trying to do didn't come up in the news, though, since it's Mandalorian culture stuff most people wouldn't get anyway. Will be explained eventually._

* * *

 _If it wasn't very obvious to everyone that I have serious problems with the canon Jedi, the Juhani scene should have cleared that up nicely._

 _Another month between updates — this is a_ _ **monster**_ _chapter, but still. I'm trying to alternate updating this and_ _ **Her Mother's Love**_ _, and also keep up on writing for my collab fic with LeighaGreene, so there will likely be delays here and there. I'm not abandoning anything, I'm just spreading my efforts around a bit more than before._

 _Finally leaving Dantooine next chapter, and it's on to Tatooine. Wooooooo..._


	17. Good news, maybe, sort of, we'll see

Right, I've been getting comments from people about continuing the story, so I thought I'd post something.

Since about October or so, I've been dealing with a combination of persistent depression and intermittent insomnia, that have been seriously interfering with my ability to write...pretty much anything at all. I've also been noticing a severe drop in quality, so I end up working on projects I care about less, little side things for shiggles, in an attempt to work out whatever the block is. (Though it's very possible this drop in quality is a figment of my imagination, because depression.) I might actually post the main side project at some point, since it's somehow ballooned to over 50k words over the last month or two, we'll see. But, trying to hold up my end of the collaborative fic with LeighaGreene (posted here under LysandraLeigh) has been pretty much all I've had in me for a while now.

Now, I _have_ been writing... _somewhat_ more consistently these last few weeks, and I'm going to try to direct my writing energy that doesn't go into the collaboration into this fic again. The next chapter is actually already mostly finished — it was about half done when the depression hole hit, and I've been adding little bits and pieces here and there — but I can make no promises about how long it'll take for me to have it out. I've recently reconsidered how a significant part of the last scene should go, which means I'll have to delete a couple thousand words, but the new trajectory is more streamlined toward the finish, so, we'll see. Also, I recently got a new idea what the next chapter should be, and it amuses me, so cooperate, brain, please.

Just, you know, thought I'd assure people who've been asking that this fic isn't abandoned. Hopefully I'll have something soon.

—Lysandra


	18. Drawing Lines — VII

"I'm afraid of what it might lead to, I guess."

Peejiʻ's head rotated to the side, in a gesture that Cina would probably strain something imitating, but had learned to interpret as questioning. "I must admit I am surprised. I would think you would consider reclaiming the person you once were as a victory, of sorts."

"I thought so for a little bit, yeah." It hadn't even been that long ago. Only a few weeks back, sparring with Rhysam and abruptly pulling ridiculous lightsaber and Force magic skills out of her arse, she distinctly recalled feeling a bit of vindicated glee at the realisation that the mind-wipe wasn't nearly as permanent as the Masters seemed to think, that her memory would inevitably return — more than that, that their failure meant they had little power over her at all, they could disapprove all they liked but there was nothing else they could do. It had been liberating, in a way.

But now? Now she wasn't so sure.

Not that she knew how to go about explaining that, really. "It's complicated."

"I'm not going anywhere," Peejiʻ said, alien lips parting in a human-style smile, blocky greyish teeth glinting dull.

"It's just, I don't—" Cutting herself off with a sigh, Cina stared up at the ceiling of Peejiʻ's office, half-shrouded with leaves yellow and purple and green, futilely attempting to order her thoughts. "I know I must have had a life, before. You know, friends and whatnot. A job of some kind I left unfinished, and probably an important one — judging by the sort of things I have an inexplicable intuitive understanding of, maybe...I don't know, something high up in the military hierarchy somewhere, or maybe a diplomat or something. If I remember _what_ I was doing, I'll probably remember _why_ I was doing it, and...

"Well," she said, shrugging, "I don't know what I'll do from there, which is the problem. I can sort of guess where I must have been coming from — there's great risk in trying to change someone's personality too much, I'm told, so my issues with the Republic and my sympathies for the Sith are probably inherited from the old me. But, from where I'm sitting right now, escalating my critiques to full-out war is _a bit much_...but I also would have been in a position to know more than I do right now, having been a Jedi for who knows how long and fighting with the Revanchists and... I don't know."

Peejiʻ let out a long, low hum, his head nodding — another gesture he'd copied from humans, didn't seem quite natural, awkward and stilted. "You worry that, if you come to know what the old you knew, you will be motivated to find your way back into the Sith."

"Yeah, and that's not likely to go anywhere good. I mean, from what I understand, the Jedi only captured me because some other Sith nearly killed me first. It wouldn't do me much good to go back and get myself murdered straight away, would it?"

The weird tentacle things on his head shifting a bit, he grumbled, "No, I suppose not. But you do have choices in this matter, Cina. Your half-death can be an opportunity of a sort — you have been pulled away from your previous life, even if you come to remember it you have no obligation to return to it, if you do not wish to."

"If only it were that simple. I don't think it is."

"Oh? Why not?"

Cina felt a wry smile twitching at her lips. "You might not have noticed this about me, Peejiʻ, but I'm simply incapable of leaving things well enough alone. I mean, if I weren't, do you think I'd be going along with this crazy shite? It has practically nothing to do with me — not that I remember at the moment, anyway — but here I am, working with the Jedi in their effort to take out the bloody _Emperor of the Sith_. Sticking my nose in, like a fucking idiot."

She hadn't told Peejiʻ about the Star Forge or anything, of course. She did have some respect for operational security, and even knowing the thing existed might well endanger him. She'd given him the impression she was training up to join a Jedi plot to assassinate Alek — in an intelligence support role, not participating in the hit directly, she wasn't crazy enough to bring kids along on a suicide mission — which was more than bad enough without bringing top-secret precursor nonsense into the equation.

"Mm, you're not being straightforward with me, I don't think."

She cocked her eyebrows. "Calling me a liar. That's some high-class shrink skill right there."

Peejiʻ had another hum for that, somewhat different in tone this time — Cina was operating on the assumption the minor distinctions in his humming had some kind of meaning behind them, but she didn't know enough about HoʻDin to interpret what it was. "You know what I mean. Your concern is more than that you might be drawn back, that you might get in over your head. It is not that you might get yourself killed. That is not the true reason you want to hold on to who you are now."

Cina rolled her eyes, letting out a long sigh. "Okay, yeah, you're right. I like where I'm at now, for the most part. Dealing with the Jedi is bloody tedious, and if they didn't have me pinned I wouldn't bother, but... I don't have a lot of options, I guess."

"If circumstances were such that you were free to choose, what would you do?"

That actually stumped her for a second — she hadn't honestly given it much thought. "I don't know. Part of me thinks, take the kids and go back to Alderaan, or maybe Shelkonwa...but I suspect there isn't anything waiting for me there. I'm all but positive my family doesn't even exist." _That_ was still surreal, sometimes, she tried to avoid thinking about them at all if she could help it...which was surprisingly easy, she assumed the old her hadn't been on nearly as good of terms with her family as Cianen. "So, that's not an option. If I had to...

"I think, I'd stay on the _Hawk_ , and partner with Kandosa to, I don't know, start up a smuggling operation, or a mercenary company, or something. There's always work to do on the rim, for people willing to do it, and I do know far more about how things on the other side of the law operate than I have any reasonable justification for knowing. And, well, if _someone_ is going to be doing that kind of work, I'd rather it be people like Kandosa and me — we're hardly _good_ people, but we're certainly better than most of the trash in the business already. Mission and Zaalbar would be completely on board for that, they have the experience and skills for it, and I can at least keep an eye on them, make sure they don't get into _too_ much trouble.

"But Sasha..." Cina let out a harsh, humourless chuckle, a dark smirk twisting at her lips. "That'd be a shite environment to raise a little girl in, but what else am I supposed to do with her? She _is_ Mandoade, it wouldn't even be _that_ strange by their standards, and I hardly see how I could fuck her up more than she's been already." Shaking her head to herself, she muttered, "What the fuck am I even doing, I'm going to be such a _shite_ mum..."

Peejiʻ let out another hum, mouth opening in a loose, alien smile.

"Yes, yes, you think I'm too hard on myself, I know. I still have no fucking clue what I'm doing — which, I should be good at that by now, you would think, it seems I hardly ever do."

"That is not nearly so uncommon of an experience as you might assume. It is an ordinary part of life, I think, to stumble and flail our way through existence. The curse of sentience, if you will." With another long, low hum, Peejiʻ slowly nodded his head. "You do have a choice, you know. As I understand how these things operate, the Jedi Order has no authority over you if you do not permit it. And, as you have told me before, the slow failure of what has been done to your mind proves any direct exercise of control is, ultimately, doomed to failure. If you wished to, you could simply leave."

Forcing out a sigh, Cina's eyes tipped up to the leaf-shrouded ceiling for a moment. "No, I can't really. It's complicated — I can't explain exactly, for secrecy reasons — but I am in a unique position to do something important, due in part to repressed memories I have from my time with the Sith. If I just walk away, Alek will... Well, he'll win. Absolutely." Cina didn't even want to think what Alek, seemingly sinking further into madness with each passing month, might do with complete dominance of the galaxy and the fucking Star Forge in his pocket...

"And why is that your business, Cina? This is the Emperor of the Sith we're talking about. Involving yourself in these affairs clearly isn't what you want. Why force yourself to be pulled back in?"

"I wouldn't be forcing myself, really. I'd have to force myself to _not_ do something."

Cina was more than convinced by now that she had a history with Alek. Of course, she'd already known that — she had been told, explicitly, that she'd been among the first batch of Revanchists, the ones that had all been recruited directly by Lesami and Alek from among their peers on Coruscant. At the very least, they would have known each other from the beginning of the war, and probably much earlier, since they'd been children. But it was more than just knowing it because she'd been told, no, she _felt_ it.

It reminded her, in a way, of being confronted with the active slave trade on Taris. Going into it, she wouldn't have expected to _approve_ of it, to be _comfortable_ with it, of course not. Her Cianen memories even included lambasting the Senate for not doing more to police slavers further out in the rim, explicitly calling them hypocrites and perhaps even collaborators. But she _certainly_ wouldn't have expected she would take it so, so _personally_. That's what it'd felt like, even thinking about it now, that slavery had been alive on Taris had made her absolutely, _murderously_ furious, in a way that had felt closer, more intimate than pure ideology.

Which, now that she knew a little bit about her own history, she thought she knew why: when the Revanchists had liberated Taris from the Mandoade, they'd taken the time to dismantle the slave trade while they were at it. There was video on the holonet about it and everything, Jedi walking into markets and warehouses and walking out with _thousands_ of people, the more graphic images showing slavers being summarily executed in the streets before cheering bystanders — usually by Republic soldiers, but even a few of the Revanchists had participated in the bloody work — a particularly amusing one where Lesami (in her Revan persona) had _broken into_ the local parliament hall and dictated terms to the planetary government, the whole thing caught on a live broadcast.

Cina had, presumably, had a direct hand in the elimination of the slave trade on Taris. It only made sense that she might take its resurgence personally.

It was much the same with Alek. She knew, intellectually, that the galaxy was worse off with Alek at the head of the Empire. If the position had gone to Nisotsa in the wake of Lesami's assassination, that would be one thing, and perhaps even represent an improvement. Lesami _had_ been quite ruthless and, while indisputably an effective _wartime_ leader, how she would fare in peace was more open to debate — now that the Sith victory appeared inevitable, that was an important consideration, and Nisotsa seemed to have more the proper temperament. But Alek, though, Alek was something else. It was quite clear he was unstable — perhaps the long wars had broken him, perhaps he'd simply been predisposed to mental disturbance, who could say — and there was no telling what damage he might do in the years to come. Cina knew that, intellectually.

But it was _more_ than that. It was hard to put words to what she felt, when she thought about Alek. It was complicated, surely. If she let herself linger on it too long, it was almost enough to get swept away in something hot and tight and lurching, intense enough it was almost sickening, she just...

It wasn't like the hatred she had for the slavers of Taris, or her disdain for the leaders of the Republic, or anything else really. It was, she thought, _betrayal_. And something quite different than that she felt for the Republic, or the Jedi — her issues with both institutions were, she suspected now, far less purely ideological than she'd thought, at least partially motivated by lived experiences with them now forgotten. No, much like the distinction between slavery in general and slavery on _Taris_ , it was something quite different, something _personal_.

They'd been quite close, before he'd stabbed her in the back.

In fact, as surreal as it might be to think about, she suspected they'd been lovers, once. She wasn't _certain_ about this, but it was a vague feeling she got, flicking through images of Alek she'd found from back during the war, and she... She didn't know how to explain it, exactly. She suspected they'd been very, _very_ close, once upon a time. Which, clearly, had made whatever he'd done to her burn all the worse. Obviously, she couldn't remember exactly what this betrayal had been, but...

(Though, that suspicion brought her down another line of thinking that she _really_ didn't like to contemplate. It had never been _confirmed_ , of course, but there had been much speculation that... And, well, what little she knew of her original background _would_ match what was publicly known, and it _would_ sort of explain a lot if... But no, that _couldn't_ be, it was completely _absurd_. The Masters had gone _far_ off the deep end with this mind-wipe brainwashing plot that they'd attempted, even if it were just some random, relatively unimportant Sith they were doing it with. But, no, they couldn't possibly, to do something like this with _the fucking Empress herself_...

(She _couldn't_ be Lesami, she just couldn't. Even the Jedi weren't _that_ crazy.

(Which was a thoroughly unconvincing argument even to her own ears, because the Jedi were _bloody madmen_ , but really, they _couldn't_ have... There were a few months between Lesami's death and her time on Coruscant that she couldn't explain, but, ignoring the practical considerations, there would have been political imperatives, if the _Senate_ finds out the Jedi— They _couldn't_ have, okay, _nobody_ was that stupid.)

As well as she could, Cina tried to explain all that — skipping that last bit, of course, no reason to get Peejiʻ in on the niggling suspicion the Jedi could have been so _unbelievably stupid_ as to attempt to _brainwash Revan_ (honestly, that was, just, _madness_ ). The stuff about it feeling too personal, that she couldn't ignore it, even if the Jedi weren't trying to pressure her into doing something about it she'd feel compelled to anyway, all that. With the added bonus that, since she suspected they'd been involved, it was very possible that, if Alek learned she was still alive, he would come after her eventually anyway. Fuck, it was very likely he already knew she was around, she'd be _shocked_ if nobody in their intelligence service had spotted her during those weeks on Taris. (Facial recognition was a crapshoot, but Mission had claimed the Sith had had eyes on the race, seeing them together would have sparked their suspicions in any case.) Her past would catch up to her one way or the other, whether she wanted it to or not. She might as well get out in head of it.

Even if it could very likely take her in directions she wasn't sure she wanted to go.

A significant part of her kind of wished she'd never caved to Rhysam's nagging and started seeing Peejiʻ in the first place. Thanks in part to the psych meds he'd formulated for her — she continued to maintain that the talking part didn't do her any good — she didn't feel inexplicably miserable anymore...so when everything went right back to shite again she actually had further to fall. Thanks for that, Doc.

Eventually, they started winding down — Peejiʻ did have other appointments, and Cina could only take so long talking about this shite at once anyway. "I understand this may well be our last meeting," he said, something Cina couldn't quite read on the slow groan of his alien voice.

Cina nodded. "I expect Mission is nearly done with her analysis, the Masters will probably be sending us out right away."

"Yes. I had this prepared ahead of time." Awkwardly turning in his swivel chair — HoʻDin were quite large, there was barely enough room to comfortably fit in his own office — he plucked a thin grey case off his desk. Setting it in his legs, he clicked it open, turned to face her. Packed in glossy black foam was a multi-dose hypo, empty and seemingly brand new, three little vials filled with clear liquid, and a slim datacard. "Each of these vials should last you about a month. The device needn't be sterilised regularly, it works through a no-contact process that doesn't risk contamination, but you should recalibrate the vacuum pressure every week or so — you will find instructions on how to do that on the datacard.

"I'm sure you remember our conversation about side-effects and adaptation," he said, gently closing the case again. "However, if you're who knows where out there, it may not be practical to come back to me. You will also find on this datacard all the information another professional might need to produce more of your treatment, or make an attempt at a reformulation if necessary. I would confirm whoever you are seeing has the proper certifications and is in good standing and, if you need a new mix for whatever reason, they have the proper equipment to do the necessary scans and tests and so forth. All that is not particularly rare, any Republic-certified operative clinic should do fine.

"Do you have any last questions for me?"

Cina almost had to smile at that — as though she'd ever really had much to ask him in the first place...

* * *

"Right, okay." Mission set her holoprojector on the floor at the centre of the circle before the Masters of the Dantooine enclave. She took a few steps back, poking at the datapad still strapped to her wrist — seemingly unconcerned by the attention of the powerful Jedi on her, as easy and casual as she'd been giving the same summary back on the ship.

Cina couldn't help the smile twitching at her lips.

"So, inside those ruins Cina and Shan went to they found a map. This map." With a flicker of blue and white static, an image of the galaxy appeared in the air between Mission and the Masters, tipped on one end to stand twice as high as Mission's head. The quality wasn't particularly great, the yellow-blue light of stars smearing together a little, but it didn't need to be. "Now, it's weird, because, we assume this must have been used by these Rakata people for astrogation, but there aren't actually any hyperlanes marked, none of the metadata anywhere matches what we'd expect. Maybe their tech worked differently somehow, they didn't need to worry about mass shadows? or their computers mapped a route before each jump? Who knows.

"But anyway," she said, physically shaking off that tangent, "there _is_ plenty of metadata to work with. All the names are useless — can't even read the writing it's in, these weird swirly things — but the file I was given _does_ include usable information about the composition of each system. The class of the star, the number of planets and their orbital mechanics, that sort of thing. A _hell_ of a lot of data, far too much to go through manually. So, I wrote a few crawlers instead, they cross-referenced the data in this map with the _Hawk_ 's navcomputer, and I was able to chart it out pretty well."

Mission poked some more at her datapad, and a few little shapes of gas and dust were highlighted, labels appearing next to them. "The big nebulas and stuff are obvious, of course, don't need anything special to I.D. those. When it comes to individual systems, things got a little more complicated — turns out, these things aren't nearly as stable as they look, twenty thousand years makes enough of a difference to trip up my crawlers. After a bit of fiddling around with uncertainties, I started having more luck.

"Corellia was practically a gimme," she said, a star near the core highlighted with a green dot. "I started specifically searching for more exotic systems, since those are the ones least likely to get false positives — like Yag'Dhul here, Japrael here, Adega here, Osarian here, and Sullust here." As Mission spoke, more green dots appeared on the map, all on the upper half of the galaxy. The half closer to the floor, presumably representing the largely unexplored West, was left blank.

Those were reasonable choices, Cina thought. Corellia was famous for its densely-packed habitable zone, five life-bearing planets crammed into such a narrow ring — most experts insisted it couldn't possibly be a natural occurrence, assumed to be a construction of the Builders — and the other systems were almost as anomalous. Yag'Dhul was surrounded with three dangerously large moons, their interacting masses wracking the planet with devastating tidal forces; Japrael had Onderon, its moon Dxun displaying an unlikely, highly eccentric orbit; Ossus alternated between the twin stars of Adega in a stable but _extremely_ improbable figure-eight; Osarian featured a pair of habitable worlds in a peculiar resonance; and the two hot giants of Sullust _must_ have originally formed far further out into the system to have the moons they did, drifted nearer the star by a spectacularly unlikely example of orbital inversion. In all the billions of systems in the galaxy, these were all practically unique, and scattered at random across the known galaxy, very good picks to get her bearings.

Cina wasn't exactly surprised, of course — she'd known bringing it to Mission would have gotten results, and this _was_ the second time she was getting this explanation. But she was still impressed.

Especially since the girl was hardly done. "Now, with these few systems identified, I had my crawlers work from these points, matching neighboring systems and slowly spreading out." Drastically limiting potential options, of course. Lines started stitching across the image of the galaxy, the shape growing more and more familiar as it went — hyperlanes, Mission had charted out the major modern hyperlanes. "I didn't bother getting everything, but you can see the general idea. We have the Corellian Run—" One of the lines thickened, not extending as far into the rim as Cina knew the actual hyperlane did, but it was also pointed the wrong direction, so that was fine. Same with, "—and the Perlemian and the Hydian and the Spine." The last was somewhat more thoroughly sketched out, which made sense, it did curve westerly. "So, we have a good framework to pinpoint things, enough to be getting on with.

"Now, where we want to get to, this Star Forge thing, is here." A red dot appeared in the largely unannotated portion of the galaxy, deep in the uncharted wilderness. "Now, I _could_ try using the metadata we have to plot hyperlanes from an identified system — Yag'Dhul, maybe, it's not so far from there — just keep going all the way through the Unknown Regions, but that's a stupid idea. This is all twenty thousand years old, trying that will get you very dead. _But_ , it's possible a different Rakata thing has more modern data.

"Now, when Cina brought this to me, she suggested identifying planets that might have intact stuff, like the one here on Dantooine. These are the settlements identified on the map." A slew of yellow dots appeared, dozens of them, scattered seemingly at random across the entire galaxy. "I cut any outside my guess of known space." A full half of the dots vanished. "I then cut the ones people'd built too much shit on — Eriadu, Sullust, Denon, that sort of thing — and any full members of the Republic."

For the first time since Cina had convinced them to let Mission give her presentation, one of the Masters spoke. With a questioning (though not quite critical) frown, Dorak asked, "Why exclude members of the Republic?"

Mission apparently couldn't quite muster the same benefit of the doubt for Dorak he clearly had for her — she shot him an almost disdainful glance, her voice clearly exasperated. "All Republic systems are fully surveyed."

"She's right," Cina added, "it's part of the admission process. It was added millennia ago," so major corporations would know whether the system had any resources they might like to exploit. "If there are any intact Laqʈakś installations on Republic worlds, we'd already have heard of them."

"Exactly," Mission said, shooting Cina a bright grin. "So, cut those out." More yellow dots vanished, now leaving a bare handful, scattered in a band heavily weighted toward the rim. "Also, we should probably leave out any Sith-controlled worlds, just 'cause going there would be a pain." There went most of the remaining possibilities, leaving only about a dozen. "I went through all of these one by one, getting rid of the ones that probably had all their Rakata stuff destroyed, or that just seemed impractical to find anything on." All of the remaining dots vanished, except for five, which immediately turned a bloody red. "So, these are the systems I was left with: Tatoo, Pyrshak, Edean, Yavin, and Horuset."

This time, Lamar interrupted, with his usual irritated (and irritating) scowl. "The Yavin and Horuset systems are quarantined, and have been removed from all official star charts. How do you even know where they are?"

Mission glowered right back. "From _unofficial_ star charts, obviously. We stole the _Hawk_ from the Exchange — you think black market smugglers care if the Jedi say they can't go somewhere?"

"Perhaps leave those two out anyway," Cina said, before Lamar could get going. "Yavin is a jungle littered with Force-active architecture, it'll be impossible to find what we're looking for in all the mess. Also, Korriban might not be a full member of the Empire, but there _is_ a Sith academy there."

"Oh. Not those, then, okay," Mission agreed, sounding rather sheepish. "Right, so, the other three. Let's look at Pyrshak. The Rakata had a settlement on Manaan there — however, it might be kind of difficult to find. See, the Manaan the Rakata knew looked like this." The map of the galaxy vanished, replaced with a single planet. It was a perfectly ordinary-looking terrestrial world, green lands and blue oceans; the ice caps were perhaps larger than was typical, but otherwise not unusual. "But, well, the Manaan _we_ know looks like _this_." Another planet appeared next to it, this one an ocean world, endless water dotted with sparse island chains. "The natives actually have stories about this, apparently, that the oceans rose a long long time ago, it's a whole thing. The oceans _are_ charted, so it won't be hard to _find_ the Rakata stuff — they even have a bunch of ruins and things marked already on the shit I could find on the 'net. The problem would be _getting_ to it, the locals don't like offworlders sticking their noses in.

"And then there's Edean. The Rakata had settlements on both the inhabited planets here, Kashyyyk and Trandosha. Trandosha is more thoroughly built up, and Trandoshans are a bunch of blood-thirsty xenophobic assholes—"

Cina held in a smirk at the faint sense of disapproval wafting off all the Jedi in the room.

"—I wouldn't go there if we can help it. But Kashyyyk has other problems." The projections of Manaan were replaced with one of Kashyyyk, another perfectly ordinary terrestrial world. "See, this one isn't much like it was for the Rakata either. Their information on the system says there are forests, yeah, but they're pretty normal forests, not that different than the bits here on Dantooine. Though, more of it, obviously.

"But the forests on Kashyyyk now are _insane_. Like, the trees are literally _kilometres_ tall. Zaalbar, he's from Kashyyyk, and he says things get really dangerous toward the surface. It's always night down there, and there are poisonous plants and super-scary predators and... It's just not a good place to be. But, he says Cina should probably be able to handle it and, unlike Manaan, the locals won't try to _stop_ you from you going down there. So, it's possible, just a pain. And would have the benefit of, you know, not being any cities or anything down there that might have ruined Rakata stuff. So there's that.

"Now, I think the last one is actually the best option, and that's Tatooine. As the Rakata knew it, it looked like this." The image of Kashyyyk was replaced with that of another, but it didn't actually look that different — there weren't any ice caps at all, and the seas looked rather greener, perhaps suggesting they were a little shallower, but just a terrestrial world like any other. Which was odd, because, "Now it looks like _this_ ," a planet-wide desert, white and yellow searing bright, broken only occasionally with patches of darker stone, the shadows of mountains. "There was some kind of climate shift here too, obviously, and a _big_ one.

" _But_ , that's actually a good thing for us, since it _should_ have been left mostly alone all this time. It might be buried in sand now, I guess, but other than that, it's probably just fine, sitting waiting somewhere. Kashyyyk and Manaan are doable, with a bit of work, but the one on Tatooine we can probably spot from orbit and walk right in."

Cina took a step forward, drawing the attention of the Masters back to herself. "As I see it, the mission is relatively straightforward. We go up the list of potential Laqʈaɦ sites Mission has identified until we find the data we need to chart a safe path to the Star Forge — based on Mission's evaluation of the accessibility of these sites, Tatooine, Kashyyyk, and then Manaan." Hopefully, they wouldn't actually need to go to Manaan, the situation on the ground there was politically sensitive enough it could get very bad very quickly, with catastrophic consequences for the entire bloody galaxy. But it would certainly be easier than Yavin or Korriban, if it came to it. "Perhaps one of these sites will have modern data, perhaps not.

"If they do not, and we end up with four obselete maps from different time periods, my hope is that Mission will be able to use all the data on hand to project something good enough to be getting on with."

That possibility Cina actually hadn't run by her, and Mission paled a little at the thought. Well, she _actually_ blushed, her skin darkening noticeably purplish, but similar physical responses in aliens didn't always mean the same thing they did in humans — blushing in Twi'leks was usually a fear response, so, it was _equivalent_ to paling, though it looked like the exact opposite. (It was far too easy to make bad assumptions when dealing with alien species, sometimes.) Her voice slightly shaky, Mission said, "Um, sure, I _could_ do that, but I'm not sure I'd want to rely on..."

"There are methods Jedi can use to aid in navigation," Bastila said. Her voice was its usual blank, hard monotone, but she _was_ seemingly jumping in to reassure Mission...which was _odd_ , but okay. "I wouldn't want to rely on that alone to get us all the way to Lehon, but if you can compose a modern star chart with relative certainty, it is very likely I can make up the difference."

"Oh. Okay." Mission bit her lip for a second. "Ah...sure? Yeah, with four different maps, I could run a simulation up to the modern day with pretty good accuracy to pull your magic stuff off of — I wouldn't trust it, but, Jedi, I guess. Might tie up all the spare processing power we have on the ship for, like, a couple days, but yeah, I can probably do that. Assuming they're from far enough apart, anyway, if they're all from the same time they're useless."

Cina shook her head. "According to the Laqʈaɦ computer we spoke with, other installations continued to operate long after the surface equipment here was all destroyed. We can't know how long these three in particular stuck around, but their data will all be newer than this map, and likely by margins of thousands of years."

"Sure, yeah, I'll start working on a program ahead of time, then."

"Once we _do_ locate Lèɦjon," Cina continued, "we'll need to confirm the Star Forge is present and under Sith control. I'd advise jumping in out-system, using the shadow of one of the gas giants to shield our wake from anyone further in, then park in orbit to minimise our sensor profile as much as possible — when we come around, we'll scan the inner system, passive sensors only. Once we have confirmation, we slip back into the planet's shadow, and jump out again.

"I realise this is above my pay-grade, but I recommend we bring this to the Republic at that point. We'll need enough forces to deny the Sith use of the station, and the Order simply can't field enough to conduct this sort of operation on your own."

The Masters seemed less than pleased with that suggestion. Tokare spoke first, staring up at Cina, his huge pointy ears tipped downward in what she'd learned to recognise as a frown. "You intend to capture the system for the Republic. Do you trust their leadership with the sort of power this Star Forge grants them?"

Honestly, Cina doubted she could trust anyone with that kind of power, but it hardly mattered. "I don't see any other option. With how critical the Forge is to their war effort, their security will simply be too tight for infiltration to be an option — even a jump out-system is more risky than I'd like. We didn't even know this place _existed_ , I find the suggestion SecInt could slip in to sabotage it completely ridiculous. A direct assault is the only option, but the Forge is simply too large to destroy with conventional methods. Perhaps, we could sabotage certain critical systems on the Forge itself to render it inoperative, which would _at best_ put the Republic in a position to negotiate a peace with the Empire, but..."

Cina paused a moment, considering what to say next. She'd been thinking a lot, lately, about the current state of the galaxy — she couldn't spend _all_ her time these last couple months studying Jedi shite, if she didn't do _something_ else every once in a while she'd go completely insane. And she'd come to conclusions she was certain the Masters wouldn't like. They _had_ to be aware, of course, but she doubted even the supposedly detached Jedi could admit the serious shite they were in out loud.

It was a common assumption among most who even cared to consider the question that the Unknown Regions of the Galactic West, comprising a good quarter of the galaxy, was civilised. It would fit the general pattern of the expansion of the Republic — their predecessors had often 'discovered' new regions of space only to find developed civilisations already existed there, sometimes even older and more advanced than the Republic itself — and there had long been some fragmentary evidence to suggest as much. Hints of trade conducted on the frontier, an unfamiliar ship or species here or there just passing through. The further known space spread out the rim and westward, the more it became clear people were already there, expansion simply following trade routes that already existed. That there might be a large, advanced civilisation out there wasn't at all an unreasonable assumption to make.

Critically, she was convinced the bulk of the Empire existed somewhere in the unknown West.

This should be obvious to anyone who looked at this mess for more than a few seconds. Many spoke of this debacle as though it were merely a rebellion of a portion of the Republic fleet, but this ignored the presence of a multitude of ships in that fleet that had _clearly_ not been put together by Republic shipbuilders, some Imperial soldiers and diplomats of unknown species hailing from unknown worlds speaking unknown languages bearing the trappings of unknown cultures. Cina wasn't in a position to get her hands on the information Republic intelligence probably had, but she still felt certain Lesami and Alek had used their defector fleet to unify the civilised portions of the West, or simply usurp control of a unified state that had already existed.

Lesami _had_ certainly usurped the throne of the Sith Empire — they didn't even try to hide that one, they _taught it in primary schools_ on Sith-controlled worlds, for fuck's sake. From what Cina could tell from the sources she had available, after their defeat over a thousand years ago remnants of the Sith had relocated from their home in the Stygian Caldera to a world called Dromund Kaas, which was supposedly somewhere in the Unknown Regions north and west of Coruscant (the Empire carefully controlled their own astrogation data), from which they'd reorganised and started rebuilding their Empire from scratch. Not long after the end of the war against the Mandoade, Lesami and Alek had shown up with the defector fleet over this unknown world. Lesami had challenged the sitting Emperor to a duel, and kicked his arse — because of course she had. Something called the Dark Council (the old Emperor's immediate subordinates, presumably, it didn't exist anymore), rather than submit to a foreigner, had assaulted her all at once, twelve versus one. (Or perhaps twelve versus two, Alek may or may not have been there, the children's story version she'd found wasn't clear on that.)

Lesami had proceeded to kill them all, in an absolutely ridiculous over-the-top battle that had left much of the Imperial Palace in ruins — because _of course_ she had, this was _bloody Revan_ they were talking about.

The information Cina could find was thin — the Empire was clearly aware the Republic's ignorance of their holdings was their strongest advantage — so she couldn't say for sure exactly how large the Empire was. But it didn't look good. The Empire had come in from the west, taken huge swaths of the northern rim, Dantooine itself practically on the border these days. (Lesami assumed this particular region had only escaped being captured due to its relative unimportance.) And it stood to reason Imperial territory was mostly continuous, to maintain supply chains if nothing else.

So, starting from the current front near Daalang at the southwestern fringes of Hutt Space, the Empire controlled a significant chunk of the midrim to the east, spreading north up through the Perlemian and the Hydian — they held both major hyperlanes from the inner rim outward, hundreds of critical Republic worlds either occupied or admitted as full members of the Empire, the few holdouts far out on the rim cut off from any assistance — fanning out across the rim westward, before trailing off into unexplored space. Then, out in the West, whatever the Empire had managed to take over before Lesami's arrival, any acquisitions they might have made in unexplored space since, tight alliances with the Republic of Ak-Tosh, the Chiss Ascendency, and the Mjatha Cooperative. (Whatever the hell those were, they knew the names from Sith documents but that was pretty much it.) According to the map they'd found, Lèɦjon wasn't at the _centre_ of the Unknown Regions, but significantly _south_ — if whatever territory the Empire held extended from wild space north of Coruscant through the West all the way down to Lèɦjon...

At this point, it was very possible the Empire was already larger than the Republic. They were mostly out on the rim, so the space they occupied was much less dense, but in terms of simple volume...

In terms of _resources_...

Frowning to herself, Cina recalled that image of the galaxy Mission had had up a few minutes ago. In particular, she considered that distance between Lèɦjon and Yag'Dhul — some thousands of light-years, of course, yet not so very far on a galactic scale, and most of it space unexplored by the Republic, and thus _unmonitored_. Who knows what might be waiting, just a couple short jumps from Yag'Dhul?

Yag'Dhul happened to be where the Trade Spine and the Rimma, two primary hyperlanes, intersected, the system acting as a gate to much of the southern rim.

It was not so very far from the current border at Daalang to Gamor, and not so very far from Gamor to Denon. Worse, reading between the lines of publicly-available news reports, the Run was almost entirely undefended — it looked like the Navy was preparing for an assault coreward toward the Arrowhead, the very heart of the Republic, or south toward Bothan space, the home of one of their most useful allies. Many of the worlds between Daalang and Denon were only loosely tied to the Republic, or independent states swearing neutrality, or peripheral concerns with only token defences. Certainly nothing that would hold up to a concerted push from the Sith fleet.

Denon happened to be where the Run and the southern Hydian met, providing access to the _rest_ of the southern half of the Republic.

The leadership clearly worried the Sith meant to conquer them, to drive a knife into their heart, the ancient worlds nestled against the core. But Cina couldn't help the thought that they had it wrong. The Sith needn't fight them directly at all.

The Navy was already struggling to resupply itself — certain light metals and chemical components used in modern electronics were largely sourced from mining concerns on the rim, controlled directly or bought from the Hutts. The Hutts already had trade embargoes against the Republic on those particular goods, not quite openly aligning themselves with the Sith, severely wounding the Republic without firing a single shot. The Sith had spread down the northern Hydian and Perlemian all the way to Corsin and Tanaab, further cutting the Republic off from critical resources — Tanaab was a particularly major blow, the source of a _staggering_ proportion of the Republic's chemical wealth. They were already balanced on the edge of the knife, as far as their physical resources went.

If Cina were in charge of the Sith war effort, she'd pick off systems trailing down from Daalang to Gamor. Once she'd secured a foothold on the Run, she'd jump coreward to Denon in a surprise assault, destroy all resistance, and blockade the system; at the same moment, she'd strike at Yag'Dhul with forces hidden in the south of the Unknown Regions, destroy all resistance, and blockade the system. In a single fell swoop, the core would be isolated from the critical mining, manufacturing, and agriculture of the vast majority of the rim, and even cut off from some of their most effective allies — the Bothans, the Tionese...

The Empire didn't have to crush them directly. They could simply _strangle_ the Republic to death, and swallow the remains piece by fucking piece.

She was certain the Republic leadership knew this — hell, she was an untrained civilian who hadn't access to the intelligence they did, and _she_ could figure it out. But she wasn't certain there was anything they could do about it. What were they supposed to do, _not_ resist assaults from Corsin and Tanaab? Before they knew it, the Sith could burn down the Perlemian and Hydian to where they met at Brentaal in the core itself, and then they'd be _completely_ fucked. What were they supposed to do, _not_ resist encroachments into the Slice from the east? It was only a few short hops from Umbara to Commenor, and if Commenor fell the Admiralty might as well all blow their own brains out, because there was simply no coming back from that. (To be fair, the Mandoade _had_ taken Commenor, but even if they still had Lesami to take it back for them this wasn't the same war — the Mandoade hadn't reinforced their acquisitions much at all, aiming for a decapitation shot and not prepared for a long slog, a mistake the Sith weren't making.) The Republic hardly had the guns as it stood to stop the Sith from driving into the core from the north or the east. They simply hadn't the resources to prevent being flanked to the south.

Cina wasn't certain this war could be won. The Jedi had successfully assassinated Lesami, yes, but the Sith didn't need her anymore. At this point, it was simply inertia.

She let her breath out with a long sigh. "I have to be honest with you, Masters, its possible this intelligence will do us no good at all. _Assuming_ we successfully find Lèɦjon, _assuming_ we successfully survey the system's defences, _assuming_ we successfully deliver this intelligence to the Fleet — and are actually taken seriously — it's all too likely they won't be able to do anything about it. The Fleet is already stretched perilously thin as it is, and I'm certain the Forge will be defended commensurately to its importance — the Republic might not be able to field the forces necessary to capture the system, even just long enough to sabotage the Forge. And _even if_ they do, it's all too likely the losses taken in the effort, and the advance the Sith _will_ make while the Fleet is distracted, will see the Republic collapse in short order in the aftermath.

"This is a _desperate_ gamble we're talking about here. If we'd known about this from the beginning it might have made a difference but, given the current strategic situation, I'm sorry to say it might already be too late. The goal isn't to save the Republic — I don't think it _can_ be saved, at this point. The goal is to deny Alek use of the Star Forge, and take him out while we're at it, if at all possible. The best we can hope for is to force a peace with the Empire, however temporary, the most likely long-term result seeing the Republic reduced to a rump state, mostly limited to the core. To believe we can achieve anything more than that is simple fantasy."

In the brief silence that followed, there was a heavy tension in the air. For a few seconds, nobody said anything, Mission standing before the lingering hologram of Tatooine looking somewhat downcast — but accepting, either having already realised that herself or simply taking Cina's word for it — the gathered Masters staring at her blank-faced. Finally, his voice uncharacteristically empty of vitriol, low and almost soft, Lamar said, "It serves none but the Sith to give in to despair."

Cina managed to not roll her eyes. "I'm simply being realistic, Master."

Judging by the chill settling over the Masters' ubiquitous presence in the Force, they couldn't bring themselves to disagree.

The rest of the meeting was largely tedious, none of it coming as much of a surprise. Cina and Bastila were assigned to track down the Star Forge — they had had that vision, and were _supposedly_ tied together by some...weird bond _thing_ , the Jedi put a lot of stock in such things, the will of the Force and all that. They were to do it alone, with no direct assistance from the Republic or the rest of the Order — which Cina had fully expected, they didn't really have the resources available to give them much, even if they could afford to spend it on a crazy gamble like this. (They didn't have to worry about funding the trip, the Order covered their members' expenses, but there were even limits to that, she'd probably be tapping her surprisingly deep personal accounts again.) There was a little bit of whining, about who else Cina planned to bring along — also as expected, the Masters had made no secret of their disapproval of the team she'd recruited on Taris. But Kandosa and the kids were bloody useful, and Cina really didn't care about the Order's opinion of her enough to change her behaviour to suit them.

It was clear that, now that she'd been accepted as one of them, that the Masters had expected she would start...well, acting like a Jedi, that she'd respect their prescriptions about what Jedi were and were not supposed to do. Things about her speech and her dress, yes, the company she kept and just what her relationships with them looked like, all the way to big, lifestyle things. Jedi weren't even supposed to own property, see, she'd been explicitly ordered to divest of any assets she had, either donating or selling them to outside parties or handing them over to the Order.

Cina had, of course, explicitly refused. Even if she wanted to give them everything she owned, she legally _couldn't_ — her flat back on Alderaan (assuming it actually existed) was part of the University trust, and could only be held by people with a stake in the institution, staff or student, and her accounts with the public bank (which she _was_ certain actually existed, she'd used them back on Coruscant) could only be held by individuals with Alderaanian citizenship. The Order _couldn't_ take possession of either.

(And, of course, her mysterious line of credit was a personal account tied to a larger group holding, which she didn't have executive control over, so what she could do with that was limited too. Whoever _did_ must know by now she'd pulled tens of millions of credits, she was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.)

Theoretically, both would be repossessed by the University and the state, if she simply renounced her tenure and her citizenship respectively. Technically, Jedi _were_ supposed to renounce citizenship of any nation they might hold or membership of any outside organisation...but, silly her, she'd never submitted the paperwork, must have slipped her mind. Whoops?

They also wanted her to leave Sasha in the Order's custody. They _did_ know Sasha actually existed now, but only because Cina had finally convinced Bastila she was real, none of the Jedi here ever noticed her if she didn't want them to — she was in the room right now, in fact, lingering invisible in Cina's shadow, and none of the Masters had given any indication they knew. But anyway, _that_ was fucking hilarious, Cina would like to see them _try_ to keep her here against her will, the unsettling little girl was a fucking ghost. Observing Cina's lessons, Sasha had come away with a terrible impression of the Jedi, and the very, _very_ few actual conversations she'd had with any of them in the weeks since they'd realised she existed hadn't improved matters at all; not to mention, Cina still wasn't convinced the Order's treatment of their younger members didn't amount to child abuse on a frankly horrifying scale. She wouldn't leave Sasha with them even if she thought the girl would stay, and she didn't even have to ask to know she wouldn't.

She hardly even listened to the lecture, honestly. By this point they'd gone over the same points so many times it wasn't even entertaining to argue about it anymore.

Finally, they were released, with a few last moralistic bits about the Dark Side, some fatalistic nonsense about destiny and whatnot, typical Jedi garbage. Cina managed to get out at least a _marginally_ respectful farewell — though, honestly, much more directed to Zhar and Dorak than the other two. It was _very_ clear Lamar hated her guts — it was rather un-Jedi-like, actually, but what did she know — and Tokare was thinking in high-level strategic terms, distant and impersonal. Tokare, at least, would be far less offensive than Lamar, _if_ she weren't convinced the whole mind-wipe gambit had been his idea from the beginning. As far as she could tell, Tokare himself didn't have the particular skillset necessary to pull it off — in fact, nobody on Dantooine did, they'd probably had to bring in someone based out of one of the other temples or enclaves around the galaxy — but his opinion on the matter, his interactions with the other Masters, spelled out his involvement clearly enough.

Lamar might be an arse, but Tokare was a _monster_ , and didn't even have the honesty to admit it.

Dorak seemed to think she was amusing, if nothing else — it helped that, in their _endless_ discussions on philosophy and history, she'd gotten the feeling he didn't approve of what had been done to her. And Zhar was...complicated. He'd known her before, he'd admitted as much. They'd clearly been close, once upon a time, which clearly just made things difficult for him. Understandably — the person she'd been before _had_ ended up betraying the Order, after all, and she couldn't imagine it was easy dealing with someone who both was and wasn't quite the person he'd known before. So, talking to him could be bloody awkward at times, but he wasn't nearly as terrible as the rest of the Masters.

Which, yes, that was a _low_ fucking bar, but at least it was enough that Zhar and Dorak had earned her not being an arse back at them. For whatever little that counted for.

Cina was still very happy to turn her back on the Masters and walk out, the knowledge that it would probably be _months_ before she had to see any of them again putting a smile on her face, a bounce in her step. Once they were out of sight, she threw an arm over Mission's shoulders, careful to not put too much pressure on her lekku. "Good work in there, _kebin'ika_. You even got all the way through without cursing at them, I'm impressed."

For a brief moment, Mission shot an odd, uncertain look up at her — couldn't quite read what that was, but Cina got the distinct impression she was missing something. It vanished quickly, the girl letting out a huff, rolling her eyes. "You don't even know how close I was. That Lamar geezer is such a jerk!"

She snorted. "Well, you're not wrong."

Bastila's disapproval was more than obvious, dark and simmering on the air around them, but at least she'd learned by now saying something about it would achieve less than nothing. "I have a few things I need to pick up before we go. I'll be at the ship in less than an hour." The Jedi turned into a side hall, disappearing without waiting for a response.

Her face twisting into something halfway between a vicious scowl and a childish pout, Mission said, "Do we really have to bring the _wall-slag_ with us?"

Cina couldn't quite hold in a shocked guffaw. Bastila had still been close enough to hear that, but thankfully her Huttese was awful — she'd probably object to being referred to by a _very_ crass slang term for a private sex slave. She realised Mission had literally been raised by gangbangers, but she had such a _filthy_ mouth sometimes. Not that Cina could judge, really, but still... "Ah, yes, unfortunately. The Masters insisted. Need to keep an eye on me, you see."

"Self-righteous, meddling shit-heads," Mission muttered — in Ryl, obscure enough of a language the few Jedi in the halls wouldn't catch it.

"Pretty much."

All told, it took closer to two hours for them to get going. Cina had told Kandosa to be ready to leave today, so he'd already stocked up on supplies, but they'd been on the ground long enough Zaalbar had insisted on doing a last test of all the _Hawk_ 's systems — he'd started before they'd left for the Enclave this morning, but wasn't quite done by the time they got back. It didn't take too long, though, Cina was just finalising the last details of their bill with the town's primitive excuse for a port when the last of their people arrived.

Bastila had arrived over an hour before, of course — the last to show up turned out to be Rhysam. She had expected him, he'd volunteered his assistance on this insane mission of theirs the second she'd told him what it was, and she'd accepted without even really thinking. Rhysam was a _very_ talented Jedi, nearly as good as she was — he did still have on edge on her at the moment, but she suspected that would change as she remembered more — and he had more experience than the rest of them (with the possible exception of Kandosa) when it came to making their way around on frontier planets like Tatooine. He _was_ just nice to have around, but she was certain he'd make himself useful in any case.

However, she'd expect him to come _alone_. Picking across the landing field behind his shoulder, dressed in loose canvas trousers and tunic (typical Jedi dress but missing the expected overrobe), a small knapsack flung over one shoulder, was a Cathar girl. Young, maybe about Mission's age — both relatively and absolutely, Twi'lek and Cathar life cycles were very similar — pale white fur accented gold, yellow-orange eyes narrowed with nervous determination...she seemed oddly familiar...

It wasn't until the pair were practically in the ship's shadow that Cina placed her. "Juhani? What are you doing here?" Cina hadn't seen the poor girl since they'd gotten back to the Enclave — she'd assumed Juhani wanted nothing more to do with her, for whatever reason, hadn't given it much thought.

Curiously, Juhani didn't answer for herself, her eyes flicking toward Rhysam, who grinned all the wider. "I seem to have picked myself up an adorable little apprentice. Isn't she precious?" The adorable little apprentice in question huffed, but held her tongue.

Cina blinked. "...Okay, didn't see _that_ one coming." She turned back to Juhani, frowned at the girl for a moment. It didn't seem like she was quite entirely confident about this decision, shoulders hunched, barely noticeable sparks of unease flying from her. (And a hint of fear, but Cina couldn't blame her for that — Cina _had_ nearly incinerated her, the one other time they'd met.) But her gaze was steady, her back straight, filled with such iron resolve she was hardly recognisable as the lost, broken girl Cina had met a week go. "Are you _certain_ about this, Juhani? This isn't an easy assignment the Masters gave us, we'll likely get into some serious shite."

If anything, that only seemed to harden her, the traces of uncertainty falling away, glaring up at Cina with fierce determination. "Yes, I am certain. There is nothing more for me, here."

Well, Cina didn't _disagree_ with that, exactly — she hadn't even bothered holding back her disapproval of how Juhani had been dealt with by the _supposedly_ responsible adults around her. (She'd told them off to their faces, and gotten another tedious lecture for her trouble, still worth it.) But just because Juhani shouldn't stay here didn't mean she should be coming with them. This could very quickly turn into a suicide mission, children had _no business_ tagging along for this kind of shite, Sasha and Mission were already more than bad enough...

Though, when she thought about it, Juhani hardly had any more options than Sasha and Mission did. Less than Mission did, actually, she and Zaalbar had the money and the skills to fend for themselves no problem, but they'd chosen to stick around — Zaalbar because of the lingering life-debt, Mission because she just wanted to. Those two were, at least arguably, responsible enough to make decisions for themselves. Juhani, though, she'd never been taught to make decisions for herself, she likely didn't know how to get by on her own. Realistically, her options were to either stay here, under the authority of people who treated her like a soulless droid, and an _expendable_ one, or attach herself to someone willing to help her out from under the Masters. Which was never easy, deprogramming and reeducating a child out of the domineering cult that had raised them — the Order would _hate_ that sort of comparison, but Cina's time on Dantooine had only further convinced her that's _exactly_ what they were — so the people she had access to with both the ability and the willingness to help were very few.

As difficult and irritating and quirky as he was, Rhysam was probably the best option she had — and if _that_ wasn't fucking _sad_. She could attempt to convince Rhysam to be reasonable and go off with Juhani on their own...but Cina doubted he would listen. Rhysam could hardly be expected to be reasonable, after all.

Cina forced out a long sigh. "Fine. Come on, then." She plodded up the ramp, waited a moment for the unlikely pair to follow behind her before slapping the controls. Flicking the intercom, "We're up, _ni burcha_. Fly for Tatooine."

By the time they got to the main room of the ship, there was already a jolt under her feet, silly boy must have been sitting at the controls waiting to go. Cina quick introduced Juhani to Mission, suffered a brief complaint from Bastila about Rhysam and his unexpected companion being here — she didn't even bother responding, Rhysam had that one covered for her — before leading her along to the port bunkroom.

"Go ahead and pick a bed, I guess," Cina said, flopping a hand in no particular direction. She pulled open the drawers under her bunk, gathering her and Sasha's things in a pile over her arm. If she didn't have the Force to cheat a bit, she'd probably drop something, it _was_ rather precarious. "It'll probably be just you and Bastila in here. I keep telling Mission she's allowed to sleep in an actual bed, silly girl's still camping with Zaalbar in the bloody comm station, ridiculous." Cina pushed up to her feet, a shirt and a couple knickers toppling onto the floor, but Sasha appeared out of nowhere, snatching them up.

Peeking around the bundle of her things, Cina saw Juhani was giving her an odd look. At least, Cina assumed it was an odd look — she hadn't much experience with Cathar, not at all confident of her ability to read their expressions very well, and whatever it was wasn't intense enough for Jedi sixth-sense weirdness to be much help. "What?"

The girl blinked, glanced around the room, eyes flicking between their surroundings and the pile of clothes in her arms. "Is something wrong?"

"Oh, no," Cina said, shrugging a little. (She dropped a couple more things, Sasha picked them up.) "I'm just moving to the boys' room, on the other side." Or, Kandosa's room, really — he and Onasi had split it, for the couple days he'd been around, and they'd arranged ahead of time Rhysam would be moving in with him. Because, that was the natural thing to do to everyone else...apparently. She still didn't quite understand the impulse normal people had to split certain spaces by sex. Maybe a consequence of not really having a sexual preference, it made no difference to her which sex (or even which species) other people were for mostly any purpose, and it honestly baffled her that other people _did_ care...

...which _must_ be something that had carried over from who she'd been before, because Cianen Hayal distinctly recalled kicking boy cousins out so she and the other girls could change into bathing suits when they were kids, and that wasn't something she could imagine actually caring about.

...

Now that she was thinking about it, the thought of wearing _anything_ to go swimming was honestly kind of strange just by itself... Huh. Wild guess, cultural difference here — she'd bet whoever had actually done her fake memories had never been to Shawken, probably hadn't grown up in the core. Humans from the rim, especially in the Corellian sphere of influence (and Alderaanian, somewhat less so), tended to be bloody prudes.

Cina walked back into the hall, Sasha and Juhani trailing behind her, the latter feeling a bit confused...and increasingly irritated, which was weird. Was Cina missing something here? "You would rather sleep with the men than with me?"

"Don't feel _too_ bad, sweetie, you are a little young for her."

"Shush, you," Cina said, shooting Rhysam, sprawled out on one of the chairs by the holotable, a weak glare. "It's nothing personal, you're just Cathar, is all."

That tingle of annoyance suddenly flared into hot rage — not just from Juhani, either, she was picking up on unpleasant feelings of slightly different shapes from Bastila and even Mission too. Which continued to be baffling, she was _definitely_ missing something now.

Something they apparently needed to have a confrontation about immediately, because the whole bloody ship had seemingly followed her into the other room. She dropped her shite on one of the beds and turned to find Juhani, Bastila, Mission, and Rhysam all standing by the doorway glaring at her. Well, Rhysam wasn't in on the glaring, he just seemed to think something was funny. " _What_?"

The three girls started talking at once, Juhani with something very confrontational-sounding — didn't quite catch the words, came out half-snarled and didn't quite carry over the other two — Bastila and Mission something more disappointed. Along the lines of _I expected better from you_.

Which was finally enough for Cina to figure out what was going on. Restraining the urge to burst into laughter, because that probably wouldn't be taken so well at the moment, she slapped her own forehead, groaning out a curse in Alderash. "No, it's not _that_. You _really_ think I— You've both _heard_ me shagging Asyr, and she was a bloody _Bothan_ , _honestly_..." It only took her so long to realise they thought she was being racist because it was just so _absurd_ , the possibility wasn't even on her radar.

Mission, at least, had the decency to look embarrassed. "Oh, right. Asyr was great. Scary lady, but..."

(Ironically, Asyr was actually a bit racist herself, didn't think much of Twi'leks in particular — Bothans tended not to think much of other species in general, actually it was a cultural thing. Asyr was at least polite about it, so Mission probably had no idea.)

Clearly not satisfied yet, Juhani hissed, "Then what is the issue with—"

"I'm _allergic_ to Cathar. These bunkrooms aren't ventilated very well, I'd probably be woken up in the middle of the night barely able to breathe. That's all." It'd be fine most of the time, as long as Juhani wasn't up in her face or anything. Though she'd probably end up taking showers and washing her clothes more often than normal, maybe take an allergy shot now and then — she'd needed to do both after their little confrontation in the forest. (It really hadn't helped that they'd only had the one speeder, she'd been _completely miserable_ by the time she'd gotten back to the ship.) But it shouldn't be too much of a problem, this wasn't the first time she'd been in relatively close quarters for an extended period with a member of a species she was sensitive to.

Anyway, that seemed to blindside Juhani and Bastila completely, the two blinking at her in blank shock; Rhysam and Mission had, of course, both burst into breathless giggles. (He was proving to be a _terrible_ influence on that poor girl.) Bafflingly, after a brief silence, Bastila started laughing too, but it came out odd, sharp and bleak, humourless and dumbfounded. "You... You're allergic to Cathar. You. _Cathar_."

"...Yes?"

Bastila covered her face with both hands, shaking her head, darkly chuckling under her breath.

...Okay? That was weird...

"So... Who wants hot chocolate?"

* * *

Her nose nearly pressed against the window, Vesa stared out at the glittering chaos of Republic City.

Vesa had heard of the idea of city-planets before. It had always seemed very strange to her, that such a thing would exist, and she'd never actually been in one herself. She'd caught glimpses of the city on...whatever planet the ship had been on when Cina had stolen it. Taris? She thought it was Taris. (Not that the name meant anything to her, she'd never heard it before and never stepped foot off the ship.) Anyway, she'd seen it out of windows, a couple times, from hundreds of feet in the air, but that wasn't really the same as _seeing_ it.

They were taking a little shuttle from the spaceport, just the three of them and the pilot. (Vesa had given him a long, suspicious look, but he seemed harmless, she was trying to ignore him.) And the shuttle had big windows, and the city was _right there!_ All white and silver and black, shining in the light of the sun (too bright and pale, it hurt her eyes a little), towers poking out into the sky like endless blades of grass, _thousands_ of aircars and speeders thread between them, crossing tightly-wound like cloth, a few zipping around in random directions, buzzing around the buildings, dipping and swooping, their shuttle went in a valley between two rows, and they were _all around them_ , whipping by so _fast_ they were a blur, the sun flicking on and off and on and off as towers got in the way, and...

It was _so big!_ How many people _lived_ here? With how _big_ the towers were — the tips went way above her head, and she couldn't see the bottoms, they just kept _going_ — and how _many_ , the city went on _forever_ , disappearing past the horizon... 'Millions' was too small a word, Sasha didn't think she knew a number big enough.

And this wasn't even the only city-planet in the Republic. And they had farm planets, and factory planets, and...

And the Mandalor had gotten into a war with the Republic _on purpose_? Did... Did he really think they could win? The Republic was just _so big_ , bigger than she could even _understand_ , really, and... That just seemed kind of stupid...

"You okay there, Sasha?"

Vesa glanced at Cina's face, reflected in the window over her head. She was talking in Basic, which was _stupid_ , but it wasn't that hard, Vesa was picking it up. Enough she could _try_ to use it, anyway. "It's big."

Sitting in one of the seats tapping away at her datapad, Mission snorted out a laugh; Cina smirked a little. "Yes, it is that."

"Which of them live here?"

" _How many_ people live here," Cina corrected, in that casual way of hers. (Also, that was stupid, what did _how_ have to do with anything...) "No one knows for certain, but the whole planet? About seven-hundred billion or so."

"What is billion?"

Cina explained in Mandoa. "A _billion_ is ten millions, ten-myriad myriads. _Seven-hundred billion_ would be seven-thousand millions."

"... That's more than all clans in one."

"By about fifteen times, yes."

...

Vesa silently stared out the window for a few seconds, the capital city of the Republic _still_ whipping by, endless, wealthy and impossibly powerful.

"Mandalor was stupid."

Cina laughed.

After a few minutes more flying, the city just going and going and _going_ , they got to what Cina called Galactic City. The towers were _especially_ shiny here, not sharp spiky shapes, but more curving and pretty. While the shuttle slowed a bit, crawling along one of the long lines of aircars, Cina pointed out the Senate Rotunda — rather short compared to the towers, but very wide, an _enormous_ ball sitting in the middle of an open space, gardens green and tile gold and red, the six-times life-size statues of the Core Founders, tiny glinting ants — a bit further away the Jedi Temple — a big blocky thing, glass and metal shining in the sun, five towers stretching up skinny enough she could cover them with a finger — the glittering towers of Calocour Heights, a long row of plain blocky buildings Cina said housed the offices for a few Senatorial departments (whatever that meant), coasting over Glitanni Avenue, which Cina said held law enforcement agencies and courts and stuff and what was probably the biggest hospital and medical school in the entire galaxy...

And then the buildings around them were spreading out a bit, the outsides more colorful and made in more complicated shapes, more gardens popping up, big banners flapping in the wind. Cina pointed out a couple spots that were apparently the embassies of core worlds — she said so, anyway, Vesa didn't know the names — but it wasn't very long here before walls swept over the windows, blocking out the city. They must be at the _Alderaanian Consulate_.

Not that Vesa knew what a consulate was — couldn't even pronounce it, really — or even what Alderaan was. She'd heard the name before, one of those really old, really important Republic worlds, but she knew very little about it. Cina was from there, that was about it.

Except, she wasn't _really_ from there, Vesa knew. The Jedi had put fake memories in her head, and the fake person was from Alderaan. Or, somewhere else, she thought — Sheko... Shelowa... Shel-something — but she'd been on Alderaan forever, so she was Alderaan'ade. Except she wasn't _really_ , but the Jedi would have had to make it _seem_ like it, for their fake person thing to work, so she _counted_ as though she was. For legal stuff.

Vesa thought that's what was going on, anyway. It was all very complicated and confusing.

(Cina thought she was actually from Shawken, another fancy old Republic world; Kandosa thought she was Vorpayyade...which _would_ make sense? Cina was probably the most Mandosii outsider ever, too much to _not_ be Mandoade. She claimed she wasn't, though, it was very confusing.)

They walked through a couple halls and up a lift, everything very blue and very silver and very _clean_ , coming into a waiting room of some kind. There were a couple people around, but it was mostly empty, chairs and couches black and blue, light music under the thin chatter, quiet and clean and very fancy. Cina walked up to a lady at a desk, took a little bit to confirm who she was, and then explaining she was here to adopt one orphan kid, and claim guardianship over an other.

Vesa was still somewhat confused about this whole thing. She meant, she didn't really get why Alderaan's leaders should...be involved in this at all? Okay, Mandoade did adoption too, but there wasn't this whole...big process, with paperwork and stuff. You just _say_ someone's your family and that's that. Well, in public, and you needed permission from clan elders, but it wasn't a big thing. She guessed outsiders just had to make everything stupid complicated, they seemed to prefer it when nothing made sense and everything was confusing.

She didn't understand the difference between what Cina was doing with her and with Mission, either. She was told there was a difference, but, when Cina had explained it, yeah, they sounded like the same thing. Because outsiders had to make everything confusing. Cina was _very_ Mandosii for an outsider, but that didn't mean she wasn't still just as confusing as the rest sometimes.

(She didn't understand Cina and Kandosa either. At first, she'd assumed Kandosa was her father or uncle or something, but that wasn't right, and then that they were married, but then Rhysam happened, no. She'd learned more recently that he was working for her, that Cina was his commander, kind of — which was _weird_ to think about, because Kandosa said he was _the_ Kandosa of Ordo, the general from the War — but _that_ didn't feel right either. Blood brothers, maybe? That seemed closer, she guessed, but...)

Vesa jumped at her name (the one in Basic, she was getting used to hearing it). Cina was looking in her direction — not quite right at her face, but very close, closer than anyone else got (which had been really scary at first, but it was Cina, it was fine) — with that smile of hers that was supposed to be gentle but just seemed kind of nervous. "Could you let them see you, please?"

Oh, right. Vesa had forgotten these other people would kind of have to know she was here. It didn't take any effort to come back, she just decided people could see her and they could. It'd been hard to remember to stay visible at first, honestly.

The lady behind the desk jumped, her hand going over her heart, muttering something that Vesa _thought_ might have been a curse of some kind. And then there was an argument with Cina for a bit. It was in Basic, the other lady using a new accent she'd never heard before, so Vesa didn't understand every word, but she thought she caught enough to understand what was going on. More or less, because Vesa could do Jedi things, the lady said she was supposed to go to the Jedi — _that_ wasn't happening, Vesa wasn't going and they couldn't make her — and Cina was telling her to go to hell. Then there was more, about Cina being Jedi now, which meant she couldn't do things like have kids...

...apparently? That seemed...weird. And also obviously false — there had been kids at the place back on Dantooine, and the lady was saying she should be sent to the Temple here, so... Maybe those were different things, but it didn't really seem to make sense. Sure, maybe the Jedi would have to give their approval before Cina could bring people into the clan...assuming the Jedi could even be thought of as one, which she wasn't sure they could. (But then what was with the kids, though...) She would think that was it if Cina _were_ one of them, but she _wasn't_ , the Jedi hadn't claimed her as such that Vesa had seen and Cina was claiming the two of them in her own name, so...

Outsiders were _very_ confusing.

The argument took a while, but eventually the lady gave up. They waited a little bit — Vesa could feel people's eyes on her, she _itched_ , she had to remind herself she had to stay visible multiple times — before a door opened, they were ushered into a back hall, narrower and plainer, without all the shiny things and pretty pictures of places back on Alderaan. (Not that Vesa had been paying much attention to those in the first place.) After a bit of walking, they met a small collection of people, all human, one of which stepped close to Vesa and crouched down a bit — she jumped, had to bite her lip and _focus_ to not disappear — and was saying...something. It was in Basic in that new accent and too high and weird, she missed too much of it. Introducing herself, maybe, said they were going to do _something_...

Cina was talking at them, she only caught parts of it. Something about Vesa being Mandoade, that her Basic wasn't very good, they should get...a something, Vesa missed too many words. Whatever it was, one of the people wandered off, while a couple more led Mission through one of the doors, closing it behind them.

Mission being gone, now only her and Cina with these strange people, only made Vesa _more_ uncomfortable. "What's going on?"

"They have to give both of you a medical exam quick. To make sure you're not sick, or that I'm not hurting you or something."

"Oh." That was... Why would someone adopt someone, only to hurt them? That didn't make any sense. "Okay, I guess."

"I'm not supposed to be in the room, so they're getting a droid quick to translate for them." Cina frowned a little. "Try to cooperate with what they ask of you if you can, but if you're too uncomfortable, that's fine. Just go ahead and disappear if you really need to, I've already explained that to them."

"Okay, I'll try." Not promising anything, though. Vesa had been to a doctor once in her entire life, hadn't liked it, not at _all_. And that doctor had been Mandoade...and it'd been _before_ all the bad had happened... No, didn't expect this to go very well.

The one who'd wandered off returned with a little ball-shaped droid, floating near her shoulder, and the two remaining women in plain white and green introduced themselves again — this time, the little droid repeated what they said in a cold, inflectionless voice, but in perfectly clear Mandoa. Laina and Hanish, apparently, which were simple enough to pronounce, but Vesa expected to forget which was which pretty quickly.

(Some outsiders had weird names. _Cina_ could be Mandoa, Mission's was easy enough, Zaalbar was fine. Juhani wasn't — Vesa tried, but it kept coming out wrong, even if she couldn't quite say how. Rhysam was impossible, she avoided saying his name at all.)

Vesa was led into one of the side rooms, which was very blue and white, pictures of flowers and mountains, posters of what she assumed were medical things. There was text on them, but it was Basic written in aurebesh, she couldn't read it. (She was learning, but aurebesh was stupid.) Vesa was directed to a thing that couldn't decide if it wanted to be a chair or a bed — she assumed it could be both, but it was bent up right now, much of its length acting as a back rest — she climbed up to perch at the foot. And they started in on the thing.

They started with questions first, which was mostly fine. Did she have any infirmities that she knew about, was anything bothering her, blah blah. The questions went on for a while, some of which she didn't even know what they were talking about — just because the little droid was repeating it in Mandoa didn't mean she knew what it was saying either — but she assumed if she didn't know what the health thing was she didn't have it. If she did have a thing, it probably would have killed her at some point, so. Then there were questions about her diet — whatever Zaalbar made, didn't know what most of it was, and lots of chocolate — and what she did with her time — following Cina or Kandosa around, mostly. And then there were the tests and stuff.

Most of those were fine. They took her height and weight first, which involved standing in a spot while they poked at a thing. The height part involved one of them (Hanish?) touching her head at one point, Vesa twitched, fought to stay visible — if she screwed it up, they'd just have to do it again. Her hand went to grip her knife at the small of her back, just by itself, and she knew Laina(?) was staring, but she couldn't help it.

She still wasn't used to being touched again. Cina was really the only one she was comfortable with, and her not even that much, really. It was getting easier, but...

Some of the other tests were...less good. They wheeled over an odd-looking machine, arms with little bits here and there that sort of looked like projectors, asked her to get rid of anything metal before lying down (lowering the back of the chair-bed as the droid translated). Vesa shot the women and the machine suspicious glares, but it was probably fine, she could just... Cina _was_ right outside, it was fine.

It was still almost physically painful to set her knife down on the counter, to walk away from it.

Lying there wasn't pleasant either. Just, lying on her back, the women standing over her, the arms of the machine thingie sweeping up and around her, and... Nope, not good, she was itching with the urge to get away, but she bit her lip, tried to hold as absolutely still as possible. (She didn't want to have to redo it.) Thankfully, it didn't take very long, a few quick flashes and the arms were pulling away again.

Vesa pushed up to sitting, and her knife was in her hand, jumping back across the room to her in a blink. The women both gasped in surprise, but Vesa didn't care if she was doing anything scary, the uneasy tingling had gone away the instant she touched it. Much better.

Then one of the ladies (Vesa had lost track of their names) was explaining the next one, pulling a pair of thin metal thingies out of the side of the machine. The droid was a few seconds behind, saying they were doing a nerve test now, that she'd be being poked with the little needles and there'd be jolts of electricity, it'd be uncomfortable but not painful, it was fine.

It was _not_ fine. They wanted her to, just, lie down on this thing, and let them _stab and shock_ her, and she was just supposed to lie there and not do anything? To borrow some of Mission's favorite words, fuck these slags, she was _not_ doing that one.

Before the droid was even done translating, Vesa sprung up to her feet, the air folding around her, and she was hiding.

The ladies tried to talk her out for less than a minute before giving up, going for the door. Before Vesa could sneak out, Cina was stepping through, and the door was closed behind her again. She glanced right at Vesa — she jumped at being caught, her heart thudding — but she turned to the women, asking them what was wrong. The droid was translating their conversation, but it was slower, it was sort of confusing listening to them both at the same time. They were explaining the test they wanted to do, and Cina was asking if they couldn't skip it, or if there was another option they could use, sounded like.

After arguing for a little bit, Cina sighed, glaring at the ceiling. Then she looked down, eyes instantly turning right to her. (Vesa didn't jump this time, she was expecting it.) "I'm afraid we have to do this one, Sasha." She glanced at the droid as it translated what she was saying into Basic, looking a little annoyed. "They aren't willing to skip it, and the other options are even more unpleasant."

It was hard to imagine something being _more_ unpleasant. Vesa suffered through the thing — it wasn't painful, but it wasn't _fun_ either, being poked at, jumping as the things did whatever they were supposed to do — her chest tight and her neck itching. At a particularly bad jump, her breath caught, she _barely_ held herself back from driving her knife into the lady's eye.

If Cina didn't stay in the room, she really might have killed the women. (Not because she _wanted_ to, it was just hard to... _take_ it, and not hit back.) But Cina was standing there the whole time, right next to her, doing that thing where she _glowed_ , the same weight that Vesa could use to hide, to make people look away or forget she existed, so much pulled into her until it was so thick the air around her _burned_. It was fine, Cina could probably take apart this whole _building_ and kill everyone inside it if she wanted to, if they hurt her, it was _fine_.

(It wasn't, really, but she got through it anyway.)

Having some of her blood taken was awful too, but it was dead easy after _that_.

Then they were putting stuff away and talking about the next test. Talking to _Cina_ , not Vesa, but the droid translated it anyway — not that Vesa understood, too much of it was adult words she didn't get. Cina cut them off right away, saying they wouldn't be doing that. The ladies argued for a little bit, saying something about it being the rules. Sounding slightly suspicious, actually.

Suspicious that Cina was hiding something, that she was doing something bad to Vesa that this test would reveal, so she didn't want them to do it. Which was _silly_ , but outsiders were silly.

Shooting an uncomfortable look at Vesa, Cina leaned in toward the women a little, clearly intending to leave Vesa out. "I think she overheard her sister being raped." Cina glared at the droid as it translated that too.

Was that what that was? Vesa had heard the word before, but she hadn't actually known what it meant. And she didn't know what it meant now, only that it was bad. She hadn't watched, she'd been in the cargo hold pretending to not exist at the time (and doing a damn good job of it, nobody found her until Cina). She'd just heard the screaming and the crying — and _that_ was scary, she hadn't ever seen Mili afraid of anything ever. She'd been told to hide, so she _hid_ , and she didn't look, she didn't _want_ to look. Anything that could make Mili sound like that had to be very bad.

Cina let out another sigh, apparently gave up on Vesa not overhearing. "You might have noticed Sasha is hardly comfortable with being touched at all, and with whatever happened that day her family... I think it's best we skip that one."

"It wasn't a day."

All three of them turned to stare at her, a variety of unpleasant-looking expressions on their faces. "What do you mean?"

Oh, damn, now she had to say something else. Vesa hadn't meant to say anything in the first place, it'd just...slipped out. She didn't want to think about this, at all, but she'd trapped herself. "Ah, they didn't kill Milesa right away. It was ten or eleven days, I think, before I stopped hearing her."

She didn't want to think about that, but at least saying what she did did some good — Cina and the women looked _horrified_ , they decided to skip whatever test they were talking about and Vesa was shuffled back out of the room within a minute or two.

(Not that she could blame them, it _had_ been horrible, she tried not to remember.)

They met with Mission back outside, one of the ladies started leading them through the hall — not the same way they'd come, Vesa didn't think, it was hard to tell. While they went, Vesa cut a few glances at Mission, frowning to herself. She looked...off. Her arms were folded over her chest, her shoulders hitched up a little, her face looking a darker blue than usual, almost purple, even. She noticed Cina noticing too, it must be obvious something was wrong.

Oh, now that Vesa thought about it, if Cina was looking after her she wouldn't have been there to make sure they weren't doing anything stupid to Mission. Hmm.

"Are you okay?"

Mission jumped, staring down at Vesa with wide eyes for a second. "Yeah, I'm fine."

"You're sure?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, kid, I'm sure." A frown creased her oddly purplish face, she switched to Basic to ask Cina, "Did they do a pelvic exam with her?"

Vesa didn't know what that was.

"They wanted to, but I didn't think it was—" Cina froze, not just her words but all of her, stopping in the middle of the hallway. While the lady leading them glanced back to see what was wrong, Cina muttered, "Is that— You could have refused, you know."

Mission made a weird, shifty shrug. "It's fine." She glanced at Vesa, before switching languages again — it wasn't Basic or Mandoa, couldn't guess what. (Mission and Cina both knew too many, it wasn't fair.)

Whatever it was, Cina suddenly looked _very_ angry. Not at Mission, too unfocused, someone else who wasn't here at the moment, Vesa didn't know who over what. They went back and forth a couple times in whatever language that was, before Cina cut herself off with a harsh sigh. "Say no, next time. Both of you, if someone, a doctor or anyone at all, is asking you to do something you're not comfortable with, say no, pass it off to me to deal with if you have to." She repeated it in Mandoa, just to make sure they both had it — which was helpful, Vesa hadn't understood all of that. "Okay?"

They both nodded, Mission looking a little sheepish. Her face was starting to fade back to the normal color, though, so she was probably fine.

Eventually, they got to a different place in these back halls, and Vesa was led into another little room alone — a rather squishier room this time, with fuzzy carpet and padded chairs and such. There was a new lady in this one, with another foreign name she forgot almost instantly, this one a bit older than the other ladies, thin lines and a soft smile on her face. After a little introduction, including what her job was — the droid said "talk-medic", which didn't make any sense, probably just didn't translate into Mandoa well — and saying she should sit in one of the chairs if she wanted (she didn't), she asked what her home was like.

Vesa was confused for a second, before deciding this was probably just a translation mistake. Obviously, she didn't have a home, since her family were all... Well, no, the Sulem surely still had a home somewhere, but she didn't know where it was or how to get there, and the rest of the clan might not even know she existed. But, the lady and the droid probably meant it in the Basic sense of the word, a place where you lived — Mission made that same mistake, calling the ship "home", but Cina didn't, because she was the most Mandosii outsider ever.

But anyway, Vesa didn't know how to answer that, really. So she just talked about the ship, which was nice — especially since she could use the beds and the bath now. And then the lady asked about the people on it, so she said a little bit about them too. Mostly Cina and Mission and Kandosa, she didn't know the others very well. Didn't really know what this woman was looking for, just babbled on for a little bit...

Vesa was somewhat relieved the woman didn't ask how she'd gotten onto the ship in the first place.

"Do you feel very close to Cina?"

She frowned — that didn't make any sense at all. "I don't think that translated right."

The lady's lips twitched, like she felt like smiling but didn't want Vesa to see it. "Do you get along, do you feel you can trust her?"

"Oh. I guess."

"That didn't sound very certain."

"I don't..." Vesa bit her lip, trying to think of how to say it. She'd been told not to lie for this thing, despite how very difficult that could be sometimes. She wouldn't say she trusted Cina, not completely, but she didn't trust _anyone_ , really. (The only people she'd ever really trusted were all dead.) So, it wasn't a bad thing, but just saying it would sound bad. "She's never broken her word to me so far, and I don't think she will, if she can help it." There, that sounded nicer and was actually something she could say without lying.

The lady nodded, wrote something down again. (Vesa couldn't spot what she was writing from here, and besides, it was in aurebesh.) "Does Cina ever tell you to do anything you're not comfortable with?"

"Cina never tells me to do anything."

"Really?" the lady said, her eyes widening in surprise. "Never?"

Vesa shook her head. "She'll ask me to do things, or make suggestions, but she never _tells_ me to do anything." Well, that wasn't entirely true, now that she thought about it — Cina had told her to go back to the ship before, to not follow her to the Jedi place. But she'd only done it that one time. "She doesn't want to scare me, or make me feel trapped, I think." The lady seemed to accept that, moved on.

After getting through more questions about trusting other people on the ship, the lady then got around to some questions about hurting people, when it was okay to do it, and when not, and how she felt about it. These were _very_ confusing, Vesa thought they might be having translation issues again. Mostly because Vesa kept giving what she thought was the obvious correct answer — _obviously_ it was okay to hurt someone if they tried to hurt you or someone you cared about first, _obviously_ it was okay to steal things if you really need them (she didn't understand why questions about stealing or breaking things were in with questions about hurting people) — but they just made the lady look a little worried.

And then she moved to _really_ uncomfortable questions.

The lady hesitated for a long moment, tapping at her knee. "Sasha... You don't have to tell me what it was, if you don't want to. But...have you ever been in a very bad situation, something so bad anybody, no matter who it was, would have found it upsetting?"

Without even thinking about it, Vesa let the air fold back round her, and she disappeared. She didn't want to talk about that. She didn't want to talk about that at all.

The lady jumped, but she didn't move, still sitting in her chair, clearly trying to stay calm. "Sasha? Are you still there?"

But...she thought she had to. This was important, for silly outsider reasons. It'd probably be fine, if she just...stayed gone... "I'm still here. When my family was killed, it was bad. I was told to hide, and I did. I just watched, and listened, and stayed hidden. Until Cina found me."

"It's okay, Sasha. You don't have to tell me about it. That's not what I want to ask you." The lady poked at her datapad for a second, then went on, not even trying to look in Vesa's direction. (Which was fine, Vesa would rather her not be staring at her right now.) "Did you have to go away because being reminded of it made you upset?"

"Thinking about talking about it."

"It's okay, Sasha, I don't need to know about it." But she was still asking about it, wasn't she? That was silly.

But, in the end, the lady didn't make her talk about it, at least not directly. She asked _around_ it, not what had actually happened, but what she felt about it now, how she remembered it, how she dealt with remembering it now. Which was sort of...silly and confusing. But better than _actually_ talking about it, so Vesa was fine with that.

Though, even _more_ confusingly, the lady was getting... She didn't like the answers Vesa was giving her. Not because she thought she was _lying_ , she didn't think — she felt all...spiky and...whatever, she thought they were _bad_ answers, not _wrong_ answers. For reasons, Vesa didn't get it. She moved on eventually, though, so it probably didn't matter too much. There were other questions, but the rest weren't so bad, enough she let herself be visible again eventually. Still weird, and she didn't really get what was going on, but it wasn't _scary_ , not like getting poked with electric needles, so.

After so many confusing questions, Vesa really didn't know what the point of this was, the lady said they were done for now, stood up and lead her back into the hall. She was a bit nervous when she noticed the _hall was empty_ , Cina was _gone_.

Except she wasn't though — Vesa could still feel her, burning bright and heavy, not far away. And the lady was leading her the right direction, so, it was probably fine.

Before long, they were walking into a familiar room, the one with all the chairs and couches. Cina was in there, sitting in one of the couches with Mission, talking to a man in a chair across from her. Vesa slipped ahead of the lady leading her, clambered over the back of the couch, slipped in between Cina and Mission. She was invisible at the moment, so the man wouldn't know she was there, but the couch still shifted under her feet, Mission glanced in her direction, shifted to the side a little, making room. And of course Cina would know she was there, she managed to meet Vesa's eyes despite her eyes not properly existing right now, her arm snaking around Vesa's there-but-not-there shoulders.

She did tense for an instant, but only an instant. It was just Cina, Cina was fine.

Question-asking lady was saying something to Cina — Vesa didn't catch it, she was whispering and she'd switched the little droid off. Whatever it was, Cina's arm clenched a little tighter around her, so...it was probably bad? Like, not angry bad, concern bad. Which was kind of silly, because Vesa was fine, but okay.

Shrugging to herself, Vesa just leaned into her a little. It was _cold_ in here, she hadn't realised how cold it would be, and Cina was warm...

Vesa didn't really pay attention to what was going on for a while. Cina and Mission were talking to the man over there, but most of it went over her head, all in quick Basic and with big words, and if it were important for her to know someone would talk directly at her at some point, and nobody was. Eventually, some other person came over, and Mission was handed a datapad, and there was a lot of talking, with more big Basic words, most of it went right over her head, and...

She was kind of sleepy. She might be tempted to take a quick nap, if there weren't a bunch of weird outsiders all over the place.

She didn't _actually_ fall asleep, but she must have been a little bit out of it, because she jumped when Cina moved, hand twitching for her knife before reminding herself it was fine, she was fine. (And even if it weren't, Cina was right there, she would kill anyone trying to hurt her first, Vesa didn't have to worry about that.) Cina was standing, her arm twisting out from around Vesa, beckoning her up with a hand. "Stand up for a second, Sasha."

Blinking in sleepy confusion, she did. Cina held out both hands, palm-up so, still confused, Vesa took them. As these things happened, touching someone who wasn't being invisible dragged her back into sight — the man in the chair twitched, she heard a few titters around them. Really what was more confusing was when Cina sank to her knees in front of her, sitting back a little, putting her eye-level right around Vesa's, slightly lower. That was weird, she had no idea what was going on.

In her oddly slurred, drawling farmer accent, Cina said, "Child, you were not of me or mine, but family is more than blood. Until you would part from me, I would keep you and teach you, protect you and honor you, one with me and mine, before ancestor and outsider of me. Vesaisa _ti-Hayal be-Sulem_ , I would hold your name in my heart as my child."

Oh. Okay. Vesa knew what she was doing now. She'd never seen this done before, but she'd heard about it in stories — that was how people knew to say things like this, what the words for special things were supposed to be, from stories they were told as little kids. Cina had changed it slightly, but it was still recognizable.

Or maybe that was just her silly accent? It was actually kind of funny, Cina saying she would _hold her name in her heart_ , when she didn't even say it correctly — when she said it, it sounded more like _Besaysha t'Ayal be-Sulem_ , which was close enough she could tell what she meant to say, like most of the time when she talked, but still noticeably off. (Mission's Mandoa was turning out to be a weird mix of Kandosa and Vesa's more precise warrior clan speech and Cina's slurring farmer accent, it sounded kind of funny.) That was probably where the "Sasha" nickname had come from, shortened from how she slurred _Vesaisa_...and Mission would have made something up anyway, so Cina had just gotten ahead of her, and picked something that was at least _close_ to her real name.

Except, it kind of wasn't her real name anymore. That was the point of this whole thing.

"Sasha _be-Hayyal_." Cina's brow dipped in a confused frown, Vesa shrugged. "I'm not really a Sulem anymore. They..." She trailed off, searching for words to say what she was thinking. Honestly, she didn't know if she had any blood relatives she'd ever met before who were still alive. The clan couldn't be entirely dead, there would still be plenty out there, but she didn't know where they were. She didn't even know their names. "They are far from me."

There was an odd expression on Cina's face, something about her feeling cold and heavy, but she nodded.

But anyway, there were words she was supposed to say. Vesa wasn't entirely sure what they were. The stories about these things usually went, they were brought together, some dramatic thing happened, one person said the words, and then it was so. She'd never actually _seen_ this done before, so she didn't know what she was supposed to be doing right now. She could just...keep it simple, then. "Cina _be-Hayyal_ , I hold your name in my heart as my parent."

That must have been good enough, because Cina gave her a little smile, before letting go of her hands. She leaned a bit further back on her heels, reached up for a datapad sitting on the arm of the couch. She fiddled around with it for a little bit, tapping at it with a little stick, pressing her fingers to it for a second, then scribbling at it with the stick. Then she leaned back again, handing the pad to the man in the chair.

She turned back to Ve– _Sasha_ (it was Sasha now), a crooked little smile on her face. "That's that, then."

Yes. That's that.

It took some more long minutes after that, people talking in Basic some more, and running around and whatever, before one of the ladies came back, handed some papers and datacards to Cina and Mission, some handshakes went around, and then they finally turned to leave. Good, Sasha was getting hungry.

They were barely out of the room with all the chairs and couches and stuff when Cina slowed, turned to Sasha. (Spotted her immediately, despite her being invisible again.) With an un-Cina-like hesitation, "Sasha...do you know what a blood-flash is?"

She blinked. "No? Wait, you mean like, those times when warriors think they're back in an old battle, but it's just in their head?" That sort of thing did turn up in stories sometimes, and she had met people who got them before.

"Yes, exactly that. The talk-medic you spoke to, she said you told her you got them sometimes."

"...Oh." Was _that_ what that was? She hadn't thought... "I've never fought though. I didn't even get hurt."

Cina's weight in the air seemed somehow heavier, didn't know what that was. "It's very common for people who've been to war to get blood-flashes, yes, but war isn't the only thing that causes them. The mind can scar as easily as the body, and the body doesn't need to be hurt for the mind to be."

...That did make sense, she guessed. She'd just never really thought of it that way before.

"If they... If you're not doing well, if it's troubling you more than usual, I want you to tell me. There's no shame in these things, it's proof you survived when someone else might not have, like any other deep scar." She was a bit confused why Cina felt the need to say that — she meant, that was just _obvious_ , wasn't it? Didn't get it. "I won't make you talk to me about what happened, but there are things doctors can do to help, if you need it. Just, don't hesitate to tell me, if it's bothering you I want to know. Okay?"

She nodded. "Okay..." She trailed off, somehow losing track of what she wanted to say in the middle of a very, _very_ short sentence. "Am I supposed to call you _mom_ now?"

Mission let out a little giggle as Cina came to a sudden stop, giving Sasha a blank, very _strange_ sort of look. "Ah... I'm not going to... I mean, I'm not gonna _demand_ you do, but if you want to, you can. I'm, um... I don't mind, either way, so much."

Okay, Sasha got why Mission was laughing at her now. That was almost the most _uncomfortable_ Sasha thought she'd ever seen Cina ever. She could barely even finish a sentence, it _was_ kind of funny.

But she didn't want to make it worse, so Sasha just nodded.

...Cina was her mother now. Like, officially, she'd done the outsiders' weird legal stuff, and they'd said the words, and everything. That was a...weird thought.

Not _bad_ , really. Just weird.

She wasn't gonna call her _mom_ though, at least not until they both got used to the idea.

"Right," Cina said, shrugging off her obvious discomfort. "Who wants ice cream?"

* * *

[You're allergic to Cathar. You. _Cathar_.] — _While it's not something people talk about very much, the thing that convinced Lesami that something_ _ **must**_ _be done about the Mandalorians_ _ **immediately**_ _was their genocide of the Cathar. Her fact-finding mission into Mandalorian space had been the ones to uncover it in the first place, her famous mask originally belonged to a Mandalorian who'd tried to stop the slaughter, it was a whole thing. (The Revan thing was a psychological campaign directly related to the genocide, in fact, referencing old Mandalorian mythology, long story.) The original Revanchists were, in a way, seeking revenge for the Cathar, and weren't even subtle about it, that motivation a large part of why the Council was so leery of the whole thing. Bastila, naturally, finds the revelation that_ _ **Revan is allergic to Cathar**_ _obscenely amusing, and doesn't quite know how to react._

 _The Cathar genocide and the origin of the mask is actually canon, by the way. I decided to make Lesami allergic to Cathar entirely because the idea of Revan being allergic to Cathar amused me. Because I'm silly sometimes._

[Rhysam was impossible, she's been avoiding saying his name at all] — _Poor Sasha, those sounds aren't in Mandoa. Those first three letters are supposed to be a devoiced trill and a front round vowel (IPA:_ /r̥y.sã(m̥)/ _). Not easy._

[hold your name in my heart] — _I used the canon adoption vow on the Star Wars wiki page, though I've altered the underlying Mandoa slightly, and also translated into English more literally._

 _Mandoa doesn't have gendered language for the most part, by which I mean there aren't really distinct words for "son" and "daughter", or "father" and "mother", just "child" or "parent". (The literal translation of the "blood brothers" term Sasha uses would be something more lik "oath siblings".) However, to native speakers of English, actually using gender-neutral terms for these things in ordinary speech sounds very stilted and strange. For that reason, I'm using gender-neutral terms in formal, ritual speech, like Cina and Sasha's adoption vows, but gendered terms when appropriate elsewhere. There is actually a slight difference in the underlying Mandoa. For example, the "untranslated" Mandoa, where Sasha says "my parent", she's saying_ ni buir _(_ ner buir _would be grammatical, but the genitive pronouns are used inconsistently, especially in this case when the next word begins with a consonant, and double especially by children); when she says "mother" or "mom", she's saying_ buir _or_ buika _, without the pronoun. Minor difference, yes, but it is aesthetically important._

 _Yes, I realise I think about these things too hard._

* * *

 _Wow, what is this, a chapter? No way._

 _For the record, Mission is a bit shaken over the pelvic exam due to bad experiences with lower-city grey-market doctors in the past, it's not rape trauma._

 _Right, next update is going to be another Revanche chapter, involving...arguably the leader of and the most influential among the loyalists. And then Tatooine. So, that should be out sometime in 2022._


End file.
